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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
Live
Desperately
Chose
Noise
Either
Days
Dies
Rather
Music

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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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.
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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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