I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 ELLISON -
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 -
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 -
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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
RALPH ELLISON -
Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON






