Ralph Ellison

"Lets not play these kids cheap; lets find out what they have that is a strength. What do they have that you can approach and build a bridge upon? Education is all a matter of building bridges, it seems to me."

"But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand."

"[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."

"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty."

"Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers lifes crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart."

"Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy."

"The understanding of art depends finally upon ones willingness to extend ones humanity and ones knowledge of human life."

"All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isnt that what were all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance."

"Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white mans relish is apt to be the black mans gall."

"Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in."

"The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by ones own human failing."

"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication."