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.
RALPH ELLISONThe 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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 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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON