Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON






