Light 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.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I am nobody but myself.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON