All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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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
RALPH ELLISON