I blundered into writing.
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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
RALPH ELLISON