I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON