It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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.
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And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.
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The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.
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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
RALPH ELLISON