We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON