Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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I 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.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON