We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONAnd 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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I am nobody but myself.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I blundered into writing.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON