Quote

I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

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
Sometimes
Invisible
Things
Walk
World
Ones
Walks
Dangerous
Softly
Sleep
Awaken
Remember
Sleeping
Best
Awake

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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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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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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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