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.
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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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?
RALPH ELLISON