Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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 truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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 antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON