I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISONIf 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISON