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Ralph Ellison quotes
...there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison
...the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Ralph Ellison
A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.
Ralph Ellison
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph Ellison
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
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?
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
...the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
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
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
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
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