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.
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 the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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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.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON






