Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISONAmerica 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
RALPH ELLISON