Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISON






