I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONMan’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






