…and yet I am what they think I am.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISONYou 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.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
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.
RALPH ELLISONI 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.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONthe 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.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISONAnd 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.
RALPH ELLISONAnd I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISONThat 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.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONI was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON