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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

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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.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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I am nobody but myself.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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 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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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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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