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.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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 am nobody but myself.
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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 recognize them and let it so remain.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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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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I blundered into writing.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






