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?
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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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 world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON