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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

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
Discover
Possibility
World

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.
Ralph Ellison
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Ralph Ellison
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
Ralph Ellison
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
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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?
Ralph Ellison