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.
RALPH ELLISONThere are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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 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.
RALPH ELLISON -
I blundered into writing.
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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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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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…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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I am nobody but myself.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to 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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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON