I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON