The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON