The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISONEvery 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. 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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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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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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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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?
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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 truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON