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.
RALPH ELLISONThe end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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I am nobody but myself.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISON