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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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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
Others
Better
Live
Absurdity
Knew
Dies

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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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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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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 is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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.
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