I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
RALPH ELLISON






