The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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.
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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form…without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death…the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON






