When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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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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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISON






