Ralph Waldo Ellison
Quotes by Ralph Waldo Ellison
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Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.
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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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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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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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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
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