Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON