Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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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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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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.
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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON