Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
RALPH ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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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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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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I blundered into writing.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISON