Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON