In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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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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The truth is the light and the 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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON