Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
RALPH ELLISON