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I’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.

Ralph Ellison

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON

Caring Cop Gun Poet Thought Trigger Word
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Activity Attention God Hollywood Hunt Invisible Men Risk Spook
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON

Available Discover Inspirational Inspiring Life One Liner
Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Chart Current Life Man Philosophy Reduce Sea
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON

Art Justice Love Miracle Protest Social
Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISON

Hope Man Picture Soaring Vulture
God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Bless God Identity Moksha Pray Shadow Truth
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Experience Grandfather Mind Side Start Trying Young
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON

Belief Light Loyal One Liner Passion Revel Truth
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Good Time Identity Memories Memory Odds Punctual Remember
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISON

Ancestor Emotion Family People Relationship
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON

Affair Beauty Dream Feel Love Price Relation Task
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

Feeling Bad Loose Low Needs Sad Territory Unhappy Worst
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
RALPH ELLISON

America Fate Loyal Recognise Share Strand Woven
We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Depend Humanity Understanding Will
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON

Bind Imprison Political Politics Potency Power Revive

I’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.

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I’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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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