Top 100 Ellison's Quotes
#1. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.
Michael Eric Dyson
#2. Ellison's Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can't lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you'd annihilate your own troops.
Harlan Ellison
#3. Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.
i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.
Ishmael Reed
#4. The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
Victor LaValle
#5. been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison's conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates's philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high
Walter Isaacson
#6. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Victor LaValle
#7. Jobs put his hand on Ellison's left shoulder, pulled him so close that their noses almost touched, and said, Larry, this is why it's really important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money.
Walter Isaacson
#9. If the press see you looking normal they can suddenly be 'oh, she's got a spot on her face, she's having a bad day'. That can be quite cruel.
Jennifer Ellison
#10. I know some people are offended by the fact that I'm spending a lot of money trying to win the America's Cup. I could have given all that money to charity.
Larry Ellison
#11. I used to think this heroic: my sturdy, stable dad, capable of anything. But now I realize that he's just drawn to dying, helpless things. The unsaveables.
Like Mom.
Maybe, like me.
Kate Ellison
#12. And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile - except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.
Isaac Asimov
#13. I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.
Larry Ellison
#14. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
Ralph Ellison
#15. My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it's someone's home that you walk through.
Larry Ellison
#16. People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?
Harlan Ellison
#17. But there's one thing that I understand, and it is that when all those emotional vertebrae broke and reformed they had a different quality. They began to have a word-making, listen-to-me quality. They began to know they were worth more.
Cara Ellison
#18. It's not always wise to assume that just because the surface of the world appears undisturbed, life is where you left it.
Jan Ellison
#19. Yes, they think we're dumb. They call us the "common people." But I've been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what's so common about us. I think they're guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact-we are the uncommon people-
Ralph Ellison
#20. When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.
Harlan Ellison
#21. 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
#22. Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.
Larry Ellison
#23. Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
#24. Pam, my new therapist, who's like some blissed-out, grown-up, yoga-hippie version of Rain, says that the physical body, the idea of the self, is kind of a scar: a brief puckering of time, a fleeting sewing together of energy and heart, which go beyond the physical form, on and on and on, forever.
Kate Ellison
#25. You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.
Harlan Ellison
#26. I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.
Harlan Ellison
#27. I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.
Larry Ellison
#28. Game-playing is more fun when it's virtual because you're more successful ... in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron.
Larry Ellison
#29. So what makes me happy? I was really happy to build this house. That's it; building things. The trouble with software is that it's very hard to show your aunt in Florida what you've done.
Larry Ellison
#30. The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Ralph Ellison
#31. He's only a man. Remember that. He's only a man!
Ralph Ellison
#32. If you let the image of the messenger get in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that's your problem, not his.
Harlan Ellison
#33. I banana the softest banana in the world; it's a new game, seeing just how soft I can banana while still banana-ing.
Kate Ellison
#34. You're ruining that book!" He pointed to the page I'd torn out. "That's a perfectly good book!" Holding his gaze, I reached down and ripped another page out. "I'm making roses." "Well, it's my book." "Sorry." I tore out another.
Kate Avery Ellison
#35. And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
#36. I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new
by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
Ralph Ellison
#37. Let's all throw unhappiness overboard.
Jan Ellison
#38. [On love:] I have no respect for anyone who says they've given up, or that they're not looking or that they're tired. That is to abrogate one's responsibility as a human being.
Harlan Ellison
#39. God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
Ralph Ellison
#40. So, if you were to divide your school in to subsections of the animal kingdom, or, let's just say into primates ...
Kate Ellison
#41. Love's young dream, alas is over
Yet my strains of love shall hover
Jan Ellison
#42. Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right ... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence.
Larry Ellison
#43. There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense ... You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.
Larry Ellison
#44. God is A.W.E.S.O.M.E! HE is Always Working Extraordinary Supernatural On-time Miracles Everyday
Sommer Ellison
#45. I worked at McDonald's. I cooked. It was one of the toughest jobs I've ever had. These people earn every single penny they get. In fact, they earn way more than they get.
Keith Ellison
#46. Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon.
Ralph Ellison
#47. Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.
Larry Ellison
#48. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do when I get there, but that's why someone invented the fine art of improv. Or, when that fails, stalling.
Danielle Ellison
#49. A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.
Larry Ellison
#50. We saw - we conducted the experiment. I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we're gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.
Larry Ellison
#51. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.
Ralph Ellison
#52. It's over, Sam. Finally."
"Yeah," he said. "I guess it is."
"Turn out the light, Sam."
Sam reached for the switch and turned out the light.
Michael Grant
#53. All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.
Ralph Ellison
#54. I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected.
Harlan Ellison
#55. I'm comfortable with my body but I don't like my bum - I think it's too big.
Jennifer Ellison
#56. Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.
Larry Ellison
#57. My name's Jennifer Ellison and one day I'm going to be famous!
Jennifer Ellison
#58. 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
#59. Life's a journey. It's a journey about discovering limits.
Larry Ellison
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.
Ralph Ellison
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.
Larry Ellison
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Most companies don't want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.
Larry Ellison
#75. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
Ralph Ellison
#76. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
#77. The coolly logical part of her brain noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio.
Micheal Grant
#78. It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
Larry Ellison
#79. When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.
Larry Ellison
#80. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
Ralph Ellison
#81. People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison
#82. We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story's end.
Harlan Ellison
#83. All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can't worry about it, you can't panic when you look at the stock market's decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
Larry Ellison
#84. You're a dick," Ellison said. "Or, is it just that you suck it?"
Aaron knew by the stillness in the room that everyone was awaiting Tony's response.
"Both," Tony agreed lightly. "And if you actually had one you might be in trouble, sailor.
Terra Laurent
#85. I cannot pay attention to what people say about my work. For me, personally, I am just this shards-and-ashes human being, who really gets upset when someone says something bad about me. If it's true, I cop to it. If I have any good qualities, it's that.
Harlan Ellison
#86. Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.
Larry Ellison
#87. The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald - and Paul Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass.
Harlan Ellison
#88. Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.
Ralph Ellison
#89. It is not unpatriotic to acknowledge America's faults. No country is perfect ... We can't reach the top of the mountain if we don't fix the injustice and confront our lies.
Keith Ellison
#90. It's not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.
It isn't real.
Kate Ellison
#91. I hate when a director says to me 'Here's how I envision this scene' ... excuse me? It's right here in the script - I 'envisioned' it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to 'envision', you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?
Harlan Ellison
#92. It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.
Larry Ellison
#93. Six seconds in, six seconds out- no choice anymore. Don't mess this up. If I mess up, even by a second, I have to start the breath cycle all over again. That's the rule. The unbreakable rule.
Kate Ellison
#94. I don't believe in very many things, but art is definitely one of them. And at the top of that list, film and art influence our world's culture much more than many of us understand and fully respect.
Megan Ellison
#95. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South
did you forget how to lie?
Ralph Ellison
#96. I know people will think it's funny because I've done glamour modelling in the past, but I felt embarrassed about my body and just wanted to cover it up.
Jennifer Ellison
#97. If it's supposed to be a really passionate snog, you slip the tongue in.
Jennifer Ellison
#98. Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it's just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don't need more money.
Larry Ellison
#99. Something in Mama's voice was vast and high, like a rainbow; yet something sad and deep, like when the organ played in church, was around Mama's words.
Ralph Ellison
#100. I love performing on stage the most. It's getting that instant reaction from a live audience. There are no boundaries, you can take your character as far as you want to, you can be the craziest person ever.
Jennifer Ellison
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