And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
RALPH ELLISON -
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON -
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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 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.
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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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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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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
RALPH ELLISON






