Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I blundered into writing.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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 my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON