I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I blundered into writing.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON






