I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONWhat 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?
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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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 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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON






