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.
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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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON






