Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONSome 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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I blundered into writing.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON