Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON