The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to 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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON