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.
RALPH ELLISONWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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 blundered into writing.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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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