Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
RALPH ELLISON