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.
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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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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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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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 yet I am what they think I am.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISON