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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.

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
Loses
Individuals
Individual
Patterns
Living
Chaos
Wells
Plan
Well
Sight
Must
Plans
Conceived
Mind
Lose
Societies
Never
Goes
Pattern

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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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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 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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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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Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
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