I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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 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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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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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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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
RALPH ELLISON