Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON