Ralph Ellison Art Quotations

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

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

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

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

We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.