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 ELLISONWords are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am nobody but myself.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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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 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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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON