I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONI 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?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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 remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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 takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISON