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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
Something
Make
Unashamedly
Integrative
Putting
Imagination
American
Else

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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.
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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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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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I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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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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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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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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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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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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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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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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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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 do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison