It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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I blundered into writing.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISON