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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

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
Harsh
Wherever
Injustice
Face
Faces
Shows
Ever
Wears

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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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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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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Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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