I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
RALPH ELLISON