Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






