We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
RALPH ELLISONThe clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
RALPH ELLISON -
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
RALPH ELLISON -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
RALPH ELLISON -
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
RALPH ELLISON -
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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON -
You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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I blundered into writing.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON -
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON