I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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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 antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON