I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISONI am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON