God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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 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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISON