Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON






