Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
RALPH ELLISONPerhaps 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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