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Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever.
Ralph Ellison -
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.
Ralph Ellison
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison -
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'File and forget.'
Ralph Ellison -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison -
Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few-and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.
Ralph Ellison -
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
Ralph Ellison -
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
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...there's always an element of crime in freedom.
Ralph Ellison -
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.
Ralph Ellison -
...the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison -
...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.
Ralph Ellison -
Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.
Ralph Ellison -
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.
Ralph Ellison