In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISONGod is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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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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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON