Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISON