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.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON






