In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONIf the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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I am nobody but myself.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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?
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON