Ralph Ellison
Author
1914-03-01
Quotes by Ralph Ellison
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a delegate shout out from the floor: "Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!" And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America's future.
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I could hardly get to sleep for dreaming of revenge.
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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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It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
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The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
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New York! he said. That's not a place, it's a dream.
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When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
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I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
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God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
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But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
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I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
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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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God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
Read quote -
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
Read quote -
I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
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New York! he said. That's not a place, it's a dream.
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a delegate shout out from the floor: "Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for controversy!" And there in the faces of my people I saw strength. There with the whites in the audience I saw the positive forces of civilization and the best guarantee of America's future.
Read quote -
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Read quote -
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
Read quote -
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Read quote