Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON