Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON