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.
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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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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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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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