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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.

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
Spite
Responsible
Hurt
Implicated
Though
Abysmal
Point
Denounce
Pain
Invisibility
Find
Partially
Love
Defend

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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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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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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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison