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.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see 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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISON