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 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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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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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 I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON