Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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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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 world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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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 American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON