"On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." They thought the old man had gone out of his mind. He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it spouttered on the wick like the old man's breathing. "Learn it to the younsters," he whisdpered fiercely; then he died."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesExistentialists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 1.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Ellison
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer and academic known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
79 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ralph Ellison →
Related Quotes
"[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged g…"
"Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series …"
"Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the p…"
"[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the tr…"
"Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—a…"
"The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human…"
"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this withi…"
"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the fo…"
"The truth is the light and light is the truth."
"All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what…"