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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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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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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON