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.
RALPH ELLISONThe thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISON