That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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 am nobody but myself.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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And 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.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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You 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.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON






