I am nobody but myself.
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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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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?
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON