I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONEducation is all a matter of building bridges.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON -
Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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?
RALPH ELLISON -
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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISON -
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON -
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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 -
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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






