I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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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 am nobody but myself.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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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.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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 thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON