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 ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISON