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 ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON