Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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 nobody but myself.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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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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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISON