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.
RALPH ELLISONWe 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON