Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISONIf only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISON -
If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON