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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

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
Mind
Shape
Shapes
Remains
Meaning
Grows
Form

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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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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am nobody but myself.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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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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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By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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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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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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