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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.

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
Question
Answers
Word
Words
Keys
Business
Rock
Everything
Rocks
Answer
Boys

More quotes by 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.
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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