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.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON






