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 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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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?
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
RALPH ELLISON