The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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I 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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see 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.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON