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.
RALPH ELLISONLife 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.
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 end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISON