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.
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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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 am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON