If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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 end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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 was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
RALPH ELLISON