Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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 truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover 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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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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