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?
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON