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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

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
Without
Labeled
File
Files
Possibility
Knowledge
Forget
Comes
Action

More quotes by 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.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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 yet I am what they think I am.
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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.
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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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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
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.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
Ralph Ellison
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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Ralph Ellison