I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISONAnd 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON