They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of — Ralph Ellison

"Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word."

"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."

"[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."

"[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in ones aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."

"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

"And I knew that it was better to live out ones own absurdity than to die for that of others."