I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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 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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON






