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.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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 blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISON






