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 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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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I am nobody but myself.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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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 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.
RALPH ELLISON