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

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
Ralph Ellison