Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONWe 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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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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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON