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?
RALPH ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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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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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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.
RALPH ELLISON