Top 100 Ellison Quotes
#1. The coolly logical part of her brain noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio.
Micheal Grant
#2. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
#3. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
Ralph Ellison
#4. Most companies don't want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.
Larry Ellison
#5. Curiouser and curiouser, he says. I smile at the reference. Carroll was totally a witch. The secrets of our world are written into that book.
Danielle Ellison
#6. Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.
Harlan Ellison
#7. If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.
Larry Ellison
#8. I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
Larry Ellison
#9. I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
Ralph Ellison
#10. The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
#11. If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.
Larry Ellison
#12. I think after a certain amount, I'm going to give almost everything I have to charity. What else can you do with it? You can't spend it, even if you try. I've been trying.
Larry Ellison
#14. I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
#15. Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Ralph Ellison
#16. I expect to find Stern, secreted away in every molecule of air, and at every turn.
Kate Ellison
#18. I always wanted to act and sing, but my first love was ballet.
Jennifer Ellison
#19. Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.
Larry Ellison
#20. I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.
Larry Ellison
#21. The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Harlan Ellison
#22. Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds ... to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.
Ellison Onizuka
#23. I wanted to have a go at a pop career. My first single, 'Baby I Don't Care', was a hit, and the second, 'Bye Bye Boy', reached the Top 20.
Jennifer Ellison
#24. When we arrived at the hospital, you were in a medically induced coma, which I was made to understand was a sort of freezing of you, a fabricated reprieve from your own body that would allow your internal organs to rest.
Jan Ellison
#25. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. Sure, there's the talent, but there also has to be the will. Give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week.
Larry Ellison
#26. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
#28. Instead I sounded like a little girl on her first day of kindergarten. My name is Bee, and I like coloring and horsies.
Kate Avery Ellison
#29. Both my mother and I were determined that we weren't going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.
Larry Ellison
#30. Maybe there is something when it all ends. Maybe there is memory, memory of the person you loved, when you lived. Maybe this is the white-light-tunnel deal, and I'm pressing toward it, and it's pressing back, until we become the same thing.
Kate Ellison
#31. She moved across the pool deck with a languor, an unabashed sexual energy that made me feel like I was watching porn.
Jan Ellison
#32. Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
#33. I don't find it a struggle to maintain a healthy diet now as my palate has changed. I don't crave rich food.
Jennifer Ellison
#34. She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.
Harlan Ellison
#35. I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected.
Harlan Ellison
#36. They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv, she'd tell me. They don't realise they're dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive.
Kate Ellison
#37. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
Ralph Ellison
#38. They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.
Harlan Ellison
#39. Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
Ralph Ellison
#40. I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don't know what I'll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around ... anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.
Larry Ellison
#41. They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body.
Jan Ellison
#42. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
#43. At core, no matter how kindly may be your thoughts of the human race, there are times when all you want to do is crumple it up and either set fire to it, or use it to pad the floor of a bird cage.
Big bird cage.
Really big bird.
Harlan Ellison
#44. Mr. Ellison is like a pomegranate: messy, leaves stains, more seeds than meat, but you pick one by one and discover all the little bits were worth it.
Avra Amar Filion
#45. He had a strange way of talking, his head tucked into his neck and his eyes fixed in the empty space beyond, as if something were suspended there, ripe fruit or a glimmer of light, as if he were not quite brave enough, or perhaps too polite, to look a person in the eye.
Jan Ellison
#46. It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.
Larry Ellison
#47. Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.
Ralph Ellison
#48. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison
#49. The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.
Larry Ellison
#50. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
Ralph Ellison
#51. Everyone thinks that just because you have a Scouse accent, then you must be 'on the rob'.
Jennifer Ellison
#52. I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half.
Jan Ellison
#53. After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.
Kate Ellison
#54. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison
#55. So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.
Ted Nelson
#56. What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.
Larry Ellison
#57. During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.
Ralph Ellison
#58. There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].
Harlan Ellison
#60. I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable ...
Ralph Ellison
#61. In order to travel far you have to be detached.
Ralph Ellison
#62. Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?
Harlan Ellison
#63. And let's remember that science isn't a game of chess, although chess may be played scientifically. The other thing to remember is that if we are to organize the masses we must first organize ourselves.
Ralph Ellison
#64. Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
Ralph Ellison
#65. When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.
Larry Ellison
#66. That is what a very Christian message is: to care about each other and to help those who need it the most.
Brooke Ellison
#67. No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
Dan Simmons
#68. Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
#69. Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.
Ralph Ellison
#70. If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
Frederik Pohl
#72. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.
Ralph Ellison
#73. The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
Ralph Ellison
#74. Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
Harlan Ellison
#75. He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.
Harlan Ellison
#76. People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child's happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in silence?
Jan Ellison
#77. Repent, Harlequin," said the Ticktock Man. "Get stuffed," the Harlequin replied.
Harlan Ellison
#78. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I
Harlan Ellison
#80. Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.
Larry Ellison
#81. Hope doesn't like to be beaten down, though, does it? Hope is what gets us through. Hope, and the prayer it wants to become.
Jan Ellison
#82. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph Ellison
#83. Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
Ralph Ellison
#84. Miracles happen. They have happened to me and they are happening to you. You need only look to the people in your lives in order to see them.
Brooke Ellison
#85. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
Ralph Ellison
#86. Any time you are put in the same category as Jane Fonda, a real legend, it feels surreal, perhaps even undeserved.
Megan Ellison
#87. The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love.
Jan Ellison
#88. they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.
Ralph Ellison
#90. I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.
Harlan Ellison
#91. You have to be able to slow down enough to switch your focus away from all the ways things could be better, to know how good they already are.
Katherine Ellison
#92. They say people who are bipolar see colors differently when in a manic state. What did Emme see when I showed her the photo a few days later?
Jan Ellison
#93. Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they're transmitted into what we call sound," you said. "The shock waves themselves are not sound.
Jan Ellison
#94. And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight.
Ralph Ellison
#96. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#97. My name's Jennifer Ellison and one day I'm going to be famous!
Jennifer Ellison
#98. The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
Ralph Ellison
#99. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Ralph Ellison
#100. Rue not my death. Rejoice at my repose, It was no death to me but to my woes. The bud was opened to let out the rose. The chain was loosed to let the captive go." - ROBERT SOUTHWELL ON MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS
J.T. Ellison
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