Perhaps 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.
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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON -
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON -
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON