We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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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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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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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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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
RALPH ELLISON