Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON