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.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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.
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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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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
RALPH ELLISON