It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONAnd I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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.
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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON