Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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 antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON






