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.
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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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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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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON