Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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.
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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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON