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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.

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
Lives
Certainties
Give
Emerge
Come
Pattern
Must
Certainty
Giving
Patterns
Chaos
Tried
Within

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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 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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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.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.
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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 thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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I am nobody but myself.
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