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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.

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
Bits
Humanity
Ability
Lying
Power
Reveal
Littles
Complexity
Little
Lies
Writer

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph Ellison
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I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
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.
Ralph Ellison
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
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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?
Ralph Ellison
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
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Perhaps everyone loved someone I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison