Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






