Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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 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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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON