If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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 the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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 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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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISON