"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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Quote collection
Ralph Ellison quotes (page 3 of 5)
95 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul - though you still Sauls around on the side."
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"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."
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"Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are."
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"In order to travel far you have to be detached."
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"Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself."
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"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."
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"I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist."
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"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."
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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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"We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough."
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"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"
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"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."
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"Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false face, and so on until it surrenders its insight, its truth."
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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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"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied"
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"Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains."
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"If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?"
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"If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy."
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"America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many - This in not prophecy, but description."
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