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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

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
Paint
Eagle
Hope
Dove
Men
Eagles
Soar
Purple
Transform
Vulture
Noble
Soaring
Picture
Moaning

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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
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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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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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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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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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