Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISONThere must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON