If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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 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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON