Quote

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.

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
Unashamedly
Integrative
Putting
Imagination
American
Else
Something
Make

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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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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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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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 am nobody but myself.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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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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Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. Stephen Covey It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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 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.
Ralph Ellison