There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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 am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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 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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON