And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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I blundered into writing.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON