Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISONSome people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I blundered into writing.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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I 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?
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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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.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON