Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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.
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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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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON