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
RALPH ELLISONI do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON