You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
RALPH ELLISONEducation is all a matter of building bridges.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I blundered into writing.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON