Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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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.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON