America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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You start Saul, and end up Paul,’ my grandfather had often said. ‘When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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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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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
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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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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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I blundered into writing.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
RALPH ELLISON