Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISONThe world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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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.
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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 am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON