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.
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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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON






