Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON