Ralph Ellison Quotes

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• It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

  Ralph Ellison

  Commitment, Committed, Grows

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• Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

  Ralph Ellison

  Life, Inspiring, Failure

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.590, Vintage

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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

  Inspirational, Confidence, Power

  "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, Ch. 6, 1952.

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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.

  Ralph Ellison

  Life, Glasses, Mirrors

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.28, Vintage

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• If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

  Ralph Ellison

  Real, Teaching, Singing

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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.

  Ralph Ellison

  Giving, Attention, Too Much

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated”, p.239, Modern Library

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• Education is all a matter of building bridges.

  Ralph Ellison

  Education, High School Graduation, Bridges

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Going to the Territory”, p.66, Vintage

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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.

  Ralph Ellison

  Fate, America, Woven

  Invisible Man epilogue (1952)

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• I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

  Ralph Ellison

  Grandmother, Grandparent, African American

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage

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• When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

  Ralph Ellison

  Inspirational, Life, Inspiring

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.254, Vintage

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• 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

  Reality, Light, Giving

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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?

  Ralph Ellison

  Trying, Lost, Expected

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.277, Vintage

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• There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

  Ralph Ellison

  World, Dangerous

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.30, Vintage

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• The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

  Ralph Ellison

  Writing, Past, Shadow

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Shadow and Act”, p.19, Vintage

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• Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

  Ralph Ellison

  Play, Style, Musician

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.364, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

  Ralph Ellison

  Lying, Humanity, Littles

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• God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

  Ralph Ellison

  Art, Shadow, Identity

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Three Days Before the Shooting . . .”, p.987, Modern Library

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• Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.

  Ralph Ellison

  Faces, Injustice, Harsh

  Ralph Ellison (2011). “Going to the Territory”, p.91, Vintage

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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.

  Ralph Ellison

  Work, Commitment, Circles

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• In order to travel far you have to be detached.

  Ralph Ellison

  Order, Detached

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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

  Men, Minorities, Individual

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.9, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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

  Gun, Cop, Poet

  Ralph Ellison (1994). “Invisible man”, Random House Inc

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• Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

  Ralph Ellison

  Losing, Danger, Where You Are

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.590, Vintage

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• Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

  Ralph Ellison

  Passion, Men, Thinking

  "Invisible Man".

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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

  Imagination

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.235, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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