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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

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
Life
Discover
Inspiring
Freedom
Free
Inspirational

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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 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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. Stephen Covey It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
Ralph Ellison
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison