I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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 end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON