Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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?
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON