Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISONEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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I blundered into writing.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON