Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISONPerhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I blundered into writing.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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.
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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISON