Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISONLight confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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I 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
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






