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.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON