It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONI’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISON