Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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 end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
RALPH ELLISON