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.
RALPH ELLISONHaving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON






