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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

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
Answers
Looking
Everyone
Contradictory
Individuality
Questions
Asking
Except
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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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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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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 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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Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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