In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON