Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISONIf the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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.
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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON