Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
RALPH ELLISONAnd my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
RALPH ELLISON