I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON






