There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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