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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.

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
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Memories
Idealists
Told
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Hope
Tale
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Odds
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Remember
Thus
Ever
Memory
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Identity
Inattentive

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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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I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
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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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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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Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
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Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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...and yet I am what they think I am.
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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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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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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.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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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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