the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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 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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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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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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON