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.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISON