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 ELLISONWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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 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 ELLISON