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.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON