All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
RALPH ELLISONI’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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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.
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And 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.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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.
RALPH ELLISON