Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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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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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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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON