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.
RALPH ELLISONMy hole is warm and full of light.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON