In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONI was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISON