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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON






