When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am nobody but myself.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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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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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.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON