Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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 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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I blundered into writing.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON