You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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 blundered into writing.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON