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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.

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
Others
Cousin
People
Ancestor
Relative
Choose
Ones
Relationship
Create
Relatives
Values
Ancestors

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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 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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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 I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.
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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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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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