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.
RALPH ELLISONLife is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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 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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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.
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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
RALPH ELLISON