America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON






