I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISONAnd while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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I blundered into writing.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON