"Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows that even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational."
React to this quote
More by Ralph Ellison
See allResonant Thoughts
"Opinion, my dear fellow, somehow or other, rules all mankind; and not like a kind master, or, which would be more congenial, a gentle mistress, but like a tyrant, whose wish is power, and whose gratif…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"After a mass extinction, it has generally tended to take many millions of years for life to recover. It's n…"
— Elizabeth Kolbert"It is fair to say that even in present-day conditions, Christian missions have been in the vanguard of init…"
— Albert Lutuli"Everybody seems to be corrupt. In my time, we didn't have anything like this."
— Tunku Abdul Rahman"Besides the long working hours, it can get monotonous meeting the same people and saying the samelines."
— Drashti Dhami"The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single i…"
— Friedrich Nietzsche"The ridge-dormers are placed in pairs, at the very apex of the roof. They are opened and closed only once a…"
— Ernest Flagg
