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.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON -
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON