And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
RALPH ELLISONEclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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I blundered into writing.
RALPH ELLISON