The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON