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

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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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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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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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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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