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 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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON