To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISONI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON