We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONGood fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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 blundered into writing.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON