Quote

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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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
Live
Invisible
Wells
Birth
Without
Gives
Well
Death
Giving
Reality
Form
Confirms
Light
Formless
Truth
Unaware

More quotes by 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.
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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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