There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
RALPH ELLISON