When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISON