Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISONI 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.
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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON