In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONWithout 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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 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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My hole is warm and full of light.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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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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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.
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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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Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON