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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

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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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