I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONCommercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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I am nobody but myself.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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.
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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 is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON