In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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 am nobody but myself.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
RALPH ELLISON