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.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON