Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISONI was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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 end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON