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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

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
Novels
Novel
Individual
Certain
Minority
Minorities

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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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.
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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.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
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I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
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I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison