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 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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I blundered into writing.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON