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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

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
Dangerous
Things
World

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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.
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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.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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.
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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 am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
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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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Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
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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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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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I am nobody but myself.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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