I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONIf social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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 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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON