That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISONYou 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.
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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON