Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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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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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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