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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

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
Exploit
Exploits
Meaning
Thing
Life

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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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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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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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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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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 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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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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