The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISONI was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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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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 antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON