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.
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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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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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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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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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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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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 ELLISON






