Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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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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 social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON