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.
RALPH ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON