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 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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON