Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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That 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.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON