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.
RALPH ELLISONThat 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON