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.
RALPH ELLISONIt 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.
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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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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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 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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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 ELLISON -
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON