In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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I blundered into writing.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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 social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON