Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISONGod is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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 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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON