I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 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.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON