Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISON






