I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONWhen I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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I blundered into writing.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON






