Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
RALPH ELLISONIn those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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 am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
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Life 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.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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My hole is warm and full of light.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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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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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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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.
RALPH ELLISON