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.
RALPH ELLISONPower, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON