All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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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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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISON