And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISONI 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON