Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISONWithout the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know 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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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 social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON