Quote

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

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
Political
Imprison
Also
Potency
Power
Revive
Make
Bind
Destroy
Politics
Word
Free

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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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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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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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America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
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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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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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