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.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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 one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON -
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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON