The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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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.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISON