I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISONWithout involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Some 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.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON