All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
RALPH ELLISONMan’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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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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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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In order to travel far you have to be detached.
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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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Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
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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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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON