If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON -
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON -
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISON