To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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…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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON