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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
Novel
Individual
Certain
Minority
Minorities
Novels

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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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'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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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 was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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