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.
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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I blundered into writing.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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 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.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
RALPH ELLISON