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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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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
Become
America
Strands
Many
Prophecy
Would
Woven
Recognise
Description
Remain
Fate
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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.
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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Ralph Ellison
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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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 am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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.
Ralph Ellison
I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
Ralph Ellison
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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