The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISONGood fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






