Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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.
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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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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISON