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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
Free
Inspirational
Life
Discover
Inspiring
Freedom

More quotes by 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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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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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Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
Ralph Ellison
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Ralph Ellison
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If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Ralph Ellison