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

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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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.
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If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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