To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONI am nobody but myself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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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I blundered into writing.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






