The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
RALPH ELLISONThe act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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 not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
RALPH ELLISON