America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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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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 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
RALPH ELLISON