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.
RALPH ELLISONMeaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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.
RALPH ELLISON