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 ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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 truth is the light and the light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON -
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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 am nobody but myself.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON