Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISONInjustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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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.
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON