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?
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON