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

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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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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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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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
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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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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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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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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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
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Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison
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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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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