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.
RALPH ELLISONAnd I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISON -
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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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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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON






