Ralph Ellison Quotes
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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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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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...the way we talk...you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there's no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they're apt to leave their true subject unstated so you'll have to supply the missing meaning.
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Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?-diversity is the word.
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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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At best Americans give but limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
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I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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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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Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.
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God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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And yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.
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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my 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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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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Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't know, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had a long road back to the campus before me.
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Play the game, but don't believe in it.
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And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.