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.
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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON