Ralph Ellison Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.590, Vintage
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“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 EllisonSource : "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, Ch. 6, 1952.
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“Education is all a matter of building bridges.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2011). “Going to the Territory”, p.66, Vintage
#Education Quotes #High School Graduation Quotes #Bridges Quotes
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“When I discover who I am, I'll be free.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.254, Vintage
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“If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”
-- 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 -
“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?”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.277, Vintage
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“There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
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“God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Three Days Before the Shooting . . .”, p.987, Modern Library
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“It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“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.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
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“America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Invisible Man epilogue (1952)
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“We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.28, Vintage
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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.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
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“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage
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“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage
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“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?”
-- Ralph Ellison -
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“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Samuel Beckett (2012). “Endgame”, p.55, Faber & Faber
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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 -
“The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.”
-- Ralph EllisonSource : Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.181, Vintage
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“I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.”
-- Ralph Ellison -
“And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.”
-- Ralph Ellison
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