Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISONHad the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON