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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.

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
Precisely
Acceptance
Terms
Writer
Longs
Goes
Borne
Term
Suspect
Must
Agony
Writing
Suspects

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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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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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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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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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There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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