Ralph Ellison Quotes
At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
Quotes to Explore
-
I wanted to make a film - and I've been wanting to do this for 16 years - about life in care, and bring it to the public's attention, because I had never seen anything, on TV or in the cinema, which said: 'This is how it feels to be a kid in care'.
-
Desire is the very essence of man.
-
If you look at the history of large financial institutions, most of them have succeeded because of a deep presence in their home market.
-
I like to take pictures of lots of things: people-such as my nephews, my dogs, and just interesting objects that I see. For instance, I might take a picture of flowers by the side of the road, an old sign or a fence.
-
I would love to do a Broadway play. I would love to do big screen also, motion picture.
-
Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.
-
I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
-
But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
-
The reality, for me at least, is that the finest recreation of a paper game, played on computer, pales in comparison with the actual, face-to-face experience.
-
Oftentimes, in fact I think this is to my fault, I look at usually scripts as a whole. I should probably pay more attention to the character that I'm going to play and what they do.
-
Indeed, throughout much of history and in many cultures, redheads have been viewed with suspicion and fear - and even killed - because of their hair.
-
I really wanted Michael Jackson to be in the first Men in Black, but he didn't want to be considered as an alien!
-
When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.
-
I guess I never had a better experience than working on The Long Riders, and at the same time, I never had a harder time than what I did making Southern Comfort.
-
The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
-
Since being diagnosed with Asperger's, I'd been working with an acting coach who has now become a good friend. We'd been trying lots of improvisational techniques to help me with some of the problems I experience. But it's a very slow process.
-
My only way of getting my uncles' attention or aunts' attention or whoever's attention was by dancing and singing around the house.
-
People think that their world will get smaller as they get older. My experience is just the opposite. Your senses become more acute. You start to blossom.
-
The types of melodies I tend to write kind of have this bittersweet quality; they're meant to be uplifting but kind of have this melancholy vibe to it.
-
As you get older, you treasure the beautiful things of the past but also see things more clearly.
-
The finer the bait, the shorter the wait!
-
Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.
-
At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
