Quote

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.

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
Life
Currents
Chart
Series
Crushing
Sea
Reducing
Wind
Tides
Courses
Ship
Formlessness
Course
Crush
Swells
Art
Ships
Inscribed
Men
Conquer
Conquers

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death...the truth is the light and light is the truth.
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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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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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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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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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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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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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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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