To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON