You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON