I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON