The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISONThat … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
RALPH ELLISON