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.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON