The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISON