I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I blundered into writing.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON