That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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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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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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.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON