I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON