I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
RALPH ELLISON -
My hole is warm and full of light.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISON -
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 -
I am nobody but myself.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON -
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.
RALPH ELLISON