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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 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
Slave
Time
Grandparents
Grandparent
Slaves
Grandmother
Ashamed
Slavery

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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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?
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
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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.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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