If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISONI 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?
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON