If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
RALPH ELLISONIt is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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 world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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 to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON