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.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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I am nobody but myself.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
RALPH ELLISON