The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON