In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONPlease, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
RALPH ELLISON