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.
RALPH ELLISONEvery 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON