Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISONLight 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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.
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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.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON