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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
Injustice
Face
Faces
Shows
Ever
Wears
Harsh
Wherever

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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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 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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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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 thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover 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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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
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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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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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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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