America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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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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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?
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON