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
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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I blundered into writing.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
RALPH ELLISON






