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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

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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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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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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 am nobody but myself.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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 I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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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Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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.
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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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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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