The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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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 ELLISON