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.
RALPH ELLISONIt takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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?
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I am nobody but myself.
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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 am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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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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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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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 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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON