Living with Music Quotes

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's 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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“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.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings