Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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 yet I am what they think I am.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That 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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON