…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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