In order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISONI blundered into writing.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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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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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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON