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.
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISON