The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISONEverywhere 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?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON