Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISONTo hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON