When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON