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.
RALPH ELLISONI 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.
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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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