It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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 American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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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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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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
RALPH ELLISON