America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON