Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISONWhen American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON