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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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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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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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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