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

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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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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 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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
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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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