Quote

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

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
Expression
Stream
Church
Commercial
Music
Streams
Cultural
Roll
Contemporary
Looting
Rock
Obscene
Rocks
Negro

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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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 suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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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At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
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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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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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.
Ralph Ellison