We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON