Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISONCommercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I am nobody but myself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON