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 ELLISONPower, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON






