Quote

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

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
Feel
Feels
Reaffirm
Needs
Territory
Things
Unhappy
Loved
Part
Need
Whole

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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. Stephen Covey It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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 is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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 thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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