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.
RALPH ELLISONWe look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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 denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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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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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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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