Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISONI am nobody but myself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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 yet I am what they think I am.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISON






