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 ELLISONI blundered into writing.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON