The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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I am nobody but myself.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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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 those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON