the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON