We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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 yet I am what they think I am.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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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?
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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 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.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON