1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4649
4650
4651
4652
4653
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 64e2086 | while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change." | Ralph Ellison | ||
| e982c0e | My emotions locked, as I saw her lipstick lying on the table and grabbed it, saying, "Yes, yes," as I bent to write furiously across her belly in drunken inspiration: SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS SURPRISE and paused there; trembling above her, my knees on the bed as she waited with unsteady expectancy. It was purplish metallic shade of lipstick, and as she panted with anticipation the letters stretched and quivered, up hill and down.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 9856c32 | Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie? | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 841aca3 | The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically. | communication | Ralph Ellison | |
| 0715c90 | No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 91c01e7 | Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c5e6988 | On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you t.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| b81ab1e | America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 9ba7df5 | I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| f7d8ba6 | Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| af0d98b | But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see -- and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less -- a b.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 3a2d4af | prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their able-bodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| f0d397b | How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 09e6ac4 | He is the greatest artist the South has produced.... Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." --RALPH ELLISON "Faulkner, more than most men, wa.. | William Faulkner | ||
| 5104232 | Thus for one lone stretch of time I lived with the intensity displayed by those chronic numbers players who see clues to their fortune in the most minute and insignificant phenomena: in clouds, on passing trucks and subway cars, in dreams, comic strips, the shape of dog-luck fouled on the pavements. I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood. The organization had given the world a new shape, and me a vital role. We recognized .. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c186901 | The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c1ebed2 | Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I'd read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene fr.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| a24df61 | But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? | Ralph Ellison | ||
| cb64e46 | I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| bcd411e | With all your speechmaking and studying I thought you understood something. But you . . . All right, go ahead. See Norton. You'll find that he wants you disciplined; he might not know it, but he does. Because he knows that I know what is best for his interests. You're a black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 724ba9f | How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do -- yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision. And now to drive me wild I felt sudde.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 265078e | The streets were full of hurrying people who walked as though they had been wound up and were directed by some unseen control. Many of the men carried dispatch cases and brief cases and I gripped mine with a sense of importance. And here and there I saw Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang. Yet they seemed .. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| cf64910 | For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they .. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 38a03ed | Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on Washington before our war industries were opened to Negroes) to impose undue restrictions upon my novelist's freedom to manipulate imaginatively those possibilities that existed both in Afro-American personality and in the restricted structure .. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| f776010 | I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. | existential race | Ralph Ellison | |
| aa4b63a | His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know? | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 06920ab | Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| cb43cd8 | The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern m.. | interesting | Bill Bryson | |
| ce9a74b | For what people of color quickly come to see--in a sense the primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which they are the object--is that they are not seen at all. Correspondingly, the "central metaphor" of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk is the image of the "veil,"20 and the black American cognitive equivalent of the shocking moment of Cartesian realization of the uncertainty of everything one had take.. | Charles W. Mills | ||
| 3614748 | We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man's idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewi.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 31425fb | To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| df07cc5 | Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. (Ralph Ellison) | Claudia Rankine | ||
| 678dd9d | All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else app.. | Huey P. Newton | ||
| 690813a | When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. | racism | Ralph Ellison | |
| c355b6b | As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| a1ce01f | It was unbelievably wild. Some continued to shout threats in their outrage and frustration, while others, both men and women, filled the air with a strangely brokenhearted and forlorn sound of weeping, and the officers found it difficult to disperse them. In fact, they continued to mill angrily about even as firemen in asbestos suits broke through, dragging hoses from a roaring pumper truck and spraying the flaming car with a foamy chemical.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 9f4ed05 | Ralph Ellison said that: "many of the descendents of freed slaves ... considered it a territory of hope, and a place where they could create their own opportunities ... [F]or Negroes it had a traditional association with freedom which had entered their folklore." Moreover, Oklahoma "lacked the intensities of custom, tradition and manners which 'colored' the institutions of the Old South." In" | Robin Walker | ||
| 33f7fae | Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. | blind invisible-black-men invisible-man racism-in-america racists | Ralph Ellison | |
| f3eec9d | When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It made me afraid that some day they would look upon.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 115a0c0 | All you have to do is forgive. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| b040941 | Emily Jacobs? | Kate O'Hearn | ||
| 3be1829 | Stress is not about the situation, my dear, it's about the person. There's some who can handle it and there's some who can't. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| 3971ae0 | Starting again: there's a secret hope that makes you hold on, to dream that you'll get it right someday, that you'll go back and take it up again and it will finally come out right. That this time all the pieces will fit. The mistake is waiting until you feel renewed enough to give it another try. You simply have to pick up the needles and keep at it anyway. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| f3e6e69 | Se tu propia seguridad y garantia | Kate Jacobs |