America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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.
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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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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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 just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISON