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I am nobody but myself.

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
Nobody

More quotes by 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.
Ralph Ellison
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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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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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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 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
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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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And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
Ralph Ellison
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Ralph Ellison
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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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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph Ellison
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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
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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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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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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.
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.
Ralph Ellison
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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.
Ralph Ellison
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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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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison
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The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Ralph Ellison