It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISONHaving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON