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.
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 antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
RALPH ELLISON