Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONI remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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 blundered into writing.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON






