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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
Memories
Idealists
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Told
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Hope
Tale
History
Odds
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Memory
Ever
Identity
Inattentive
Would

More quotes by Ralph Ellison

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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
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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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Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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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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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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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.
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Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
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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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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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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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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.
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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.
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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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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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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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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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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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In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
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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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