We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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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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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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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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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I blundered into writing.
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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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.
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
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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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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
RALPH ELLISON