If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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 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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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 thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON