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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Ralph Ellison

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON

Clock Empty Life Perfect Positive Sirens Tick Trying Urgency Value
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON

Enough Morning Museum Sun
And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON

Absurdity Awesome Better Die Life Live Share
We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
RALPH ELLISON

Art Depend Humanity Understanding Will
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISON

Danger Feel Inspire Motivation Losing Sense Where
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON

Confirm Death Giving Life Light Reality Truth
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON

Affair Beauty Dream Feel Love Price Relation Task
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Ancestor Emotion Family People Relationship
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON

Action Brain Forget Knowledge Possibility Power
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON

Bind Imprison Political Politics Potency Power Revive
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

Being Yourself Ego Expectation Life Love Respect Self Self Esteem
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON

Feeling Bad Loose Low Needs Sad Territory Unhappy Worst
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Activity Attention God Hollywood Hunt Invisible Men Risk Spook
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

Act Circle Commitment Involvement Study Work
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISON

Butterfly Friend Happy Journey Long Love Order Plan Travel
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Good Time Identity Memories Memory Odds Punctual Remember

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

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