If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON