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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
Relative
Choose
Ones
Relationship
Create
Relatives
Values
Ancestors
Others
Cousin
People
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More quotes by Ralph Ellison
I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
Ralph Ellison
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
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph Ellison
I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Ralph Ellison
Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
Ralph Ellison
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Ralph Ellison
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
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?
Ralph Ellison
