I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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 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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISON






