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.
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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I blundered into writing.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON