Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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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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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.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
RALPH ELLISON