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.
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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON