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.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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.
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I am nobody but myself.
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I blundered into writing.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON