In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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.
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON