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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
Noise
Either
Days
Dies
Rather
Music
Live
Desperately
Chose

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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. Stephen Covey It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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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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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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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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