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.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
RALPH ELLISON






