Juneteenth Quotes

“Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man....”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths we have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation. But look, Hickman—Alonzo … this is here and now and the stuff has begun to bubble. The man who fell and the man lying there on the bed is the child, Bliss. That’s the mystery. How did he become the child of that babyhood … father to the man, as it goes? And how could he have been my child, nephew and grandchild and brother-in-Christ as he grew? The confounding mystery of it has to be struggled with and I wish it was all a lie and and we could go back home and forget it.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“if you don’t, you’re already dead anyway. Now hush, because you’re simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“people face Death and even go a piece with him and then wrestle with him and get away, thank the Lord, and return. Yes, but how many have I seen pass on and”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Even let them eat hummingbirds’ wings and tell you it’s too good for you.—Grits and greens don’t turn to ashes in anybody’s mouth—how about it, Rev. Eatmore?”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,’ Revern’ Hickman? Is it still celebrated?”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“you ought to know better’n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“And he’ll learn that his index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink-finger and pulling his bow.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Don’t laugh at fools. Some are His.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of invisibility is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by millions—that it is automatically invoked when we talk about the situation of black Americans and any social group we willingly refuse to see.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“Ellison stated that “by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding), the human imagination is integrative—and the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspirits the democratic process.”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

“My God, you don’t write out of your skin; you write out of your imagination.” Ralph Ellison”
― Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth