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Education is all a matter of building bridges.

Ralph Ellison

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Ralph Ellison
Age: 80 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 1
Died: 1994
Died: April 16
Autobiographer
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Music Critic
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Matter
Bridges
Educational
Diversity
Building
Education
Culture

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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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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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.
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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
Ralph Ellison
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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