When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISONEducation is all a matter of building bridges.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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 nobody but myself.
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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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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISON