I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONPower 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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 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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






