If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
RALPH ELLISONI 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.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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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.
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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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I blundered into writing.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget.’
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
RALPH ELLISON