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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.
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
Might
Large
Writing
Gave
Affirmed
Reader
Utmost
Writer
Readers
Within
Critics
Sense
Communication
Others
Identity
Form
Importance
More quotes by Ralph Ellison
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
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
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.
Ralph Ellison
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
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
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison
Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
Ralph Ellison
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.
Ralph Ellison
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
...and yet I am what they think I am.
Ralph Ellison
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Ralph Ellison
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Ralph Ellison
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
Ralph Ellison
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
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
