Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON