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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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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
Music
Live
Desperately
Chose
Noise
Either
Days
Dies
Rather

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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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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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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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