I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONYou 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON