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 ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON