Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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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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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON -
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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?
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON