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.
RALPH ELLISONAll 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON