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I am nobody but myself.

Ralph Ellison

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

Aim Concentrate Focus Ornery Plan Task Wonderful World
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON

Dangerous Few Permission Prohibited Sleepwaker World
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Experience Grandfather Mind Side Start Trying Young
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Chart Current Life Man Philosophy Reduce Sea
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON

Enough Morning Museum Sun
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISON

Answer Boys Business Keys Question Rock Word
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Ancestor Emotion Family People Relationship
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON

Absurdity Awesome Better Die Life Live Share
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON

Caring Cop Gun Poet Thought Trigger Word
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Confirm Death Giving Life Light Reality Truth
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Conflict Crafts Discuss Immediate Novel Occupation Serious
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON

Choice Day Desperate Live Music
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON

Hobby Myself Past Require Shadow Skill Value Writing
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
RALPH ELLISON

Coveive Live Lose Mind Pattern Plan Sight
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON

Copy Exact Recognize Same Strand Unchanged Woven
…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON

Believe Dream Good Inspiration One Liner Positive Success Thinking

I am nobody but myself.

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I am nobody but myself.

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