Ralph Ellison

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#defeat #humanity #life #life

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#inspirational

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#self-confidence

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#inspirational

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#business

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#fiction #humor #rsas #humor

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#travel #love

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#god #identity #love #art

They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#inspirational

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#blindness #had #i #looked #looking