Ralph Ellison Quotes

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

I'm hopeless - all I know is that time is going past so fast.

Time is: Too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear.

I feared the verdict of the watch, where I either lost the race against time that day or would lose it soon by making the record even harder to break. The time trap had snapped shut.

We live in a vacuous world, yet we do so with a feeling of urgency.

You know, men and women are a lot alike in certain situations. Like when they're both on fire - they're exactly alike.

People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.

On '24,' you don't have time to emote and deal with stuff, because stuff just keeps happening. Every other minute, there's something crazy that's happening that's threatening this country.

Why is life speeded up so? Why are things so terribly, unbearably precious that you can't enjoy them but can only wait breathless in dread of their going?

Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass." Like somehow we're running out of time.

I'd be smiling if I wasn't so desperate. I'd be patient if I had the time.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

We’re burning,” Sadie pointed out helpfully. “Noticed!” I yelled back.

Then - as he was talking - a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

It's never too early to panic.

Try not to wake up on fire.

He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

...you look at me like an emergency

Urgent necessity prompts many to do things, at the very thoughts of which they perhaps would start at other times.

Tension means hurry, fear, doubt. Tension means a constant effort to protect, to be secure, to be safe. Tension means preparing for the tomorrow now, or for the afterlife - afraid tomorrow you will not be able to face the reality, so be prepared. Tension means the past that you have not lived really but only somehow bypassed; it hangs, it is a hangover, it surrounds you.

I am dying. Please ... bring me a toothpick.

Time meanwhile is flying, flying beyond recall.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.