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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
Grandparent
Slaves
Grandmother
Ashamed
Slavery
Slave
Time
Grandparents
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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At best Americans give but a 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.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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.
Ralph Ellison
I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison