The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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All 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.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON