The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON -
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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people 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.
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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON