Ralph Ellison

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

...the way we talk...you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there's no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they're apt to leave their true subject unstated so you'll have to supply the missing meaning.

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

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

And yet I am what they think I am.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

[T]o hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

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

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.