God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON