The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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I am nobody but myself.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON