Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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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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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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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 blundered into writing.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON