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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Ralph Ellison

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON

Bind Imprison Political Politics Potency Power Revive
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON

Asking Being Yourself Individuality Myself Query Question
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON

Advantage Motivation Nerve Proud Shine Solitude Unseen Wear
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON

Choice Day Desperate Live Music
Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON

Church Comercial Culture Expression Music Rocks Stream Trend
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

Conflict Crafts Discuss Immediate Novel Occupation Serious
God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Bless God Identity Moksha Pray Shadow Truth
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISON

Detached Explore Journey Memories Order Travel
If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON

Art Justice Love Miracle Protest Social
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON

Believe Dream Good Inspiration One Liner Positive Success Thinking
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON

Enough Morning Museum Sun
We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Depend Humanity Understanding Will
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Butterfly Friend Happy Journey Long Love Order Plan Travel
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISON

Danger Feel Inspire Motivation Losing Sense Where
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON

Confirm Death Giving Life Light Reality Truth
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Emotion Fairy Stories Faith Fiction Heart Leaving Love Loyal Reality Science
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISON

Act American Life Life Positive Rules Theatrical
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Chart Current Life Man Philosophy Reduce Sea
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON

Clock Empty Life Perfect Positive Sirens Tick Trying Urgency Value
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON

Act Frequency Knowledge Knows Lower Motivation Speak
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON

Feeling Bad Loose Low Needs Sad Territory Unhappy Worst
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.
RALPH ELLISON

America Fate Loyal Recognise Share Strand Woven
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

Believe Confidence Inspirational Power Trust
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON

Available Discover Inspirational Inspiring Life One Liner
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON

Hobby Myself Past Require Shadow Skill Value Writing
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.
RALPH ELLISON
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Aim Concentrate Focus Ornery Plan Task Wonderful World

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

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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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Popular Authors

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