Quote

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
Many
Prophecy
Would
Woven
Recognise
Description
Remain
Fate
Become
America
Strands

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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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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 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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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.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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