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
RALPH ELLISONAll novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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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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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.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON