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.
RALPH ELLISONIn order to travel far you have to be detached.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON