When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONAmerica is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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There 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.
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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.
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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, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
RALPH ELLISON






