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.
RALPH ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON