Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON