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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.

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
Trying
Sirens
Time
Urgency
Catch
Clock
Street
Empty
Howled
Streets
Ticked
Though
Siren

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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 world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.
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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 I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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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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