And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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.
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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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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON