Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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’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.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON