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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?
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
Wanted
Everywhere
Good
Turned
Sacrifice
Ones
Sacrificial
Somebody
Benefited
Stop
Merry
Start
Round
Point
Rounds
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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