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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.

Ralph Ellison

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON

Fail Fear Issue Loose My Own Problem Try Way
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON

Caring Cop Gun Poet Thought Trigger Word
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?
RALPH ELLISON

Attempt Denial Excuse Invisibility Invisible Irresponsible Lazy Way
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
RALPH ELLISON

Hate Honest Life Satisfied Success Try Work
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON

Clock Empty Life Perfect Positive Sirens Tick Trying Urgency Value
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
RALPH ELLISON

Available Discover Inspirational Inspiring Life One Liner
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.
RALPH ELLISON

Activity Attention God Hollywood Hunt Invisible Men Risk Spook
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
RALPH ELLISON

Action Brain Forget Knowledge Possibility Power
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

Good Time Identity Memories Memory Odds Punctual Remember
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON

Advantage Motivation Nerve Proud Shine Solitude Unseen Wear
Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
RALPH ELLISON

Church Comercial Culture Expression Music Rocks Stream Trend
the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
RALPH ELLISON

Aim Concentrate Focus Ornery Plan Task Wonderful World
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON

Bind Imprison Political Politics Potency Power Revive
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
RALPH ELLISON

Affection Afraid Family Grandmother Grandparent Love Slave
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

Coveive Live Lose Mind Pattern Plan Sight
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.
RALPH ELLISON

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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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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Popular Authors

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