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 ELLISONI 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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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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.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON