I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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 those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON