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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.

Ralph Ellison
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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.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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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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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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If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
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The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
Ralph Ellison
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
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
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.
Ralph Ellison
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Ralph Ellison
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
Ralph Ellison
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
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man...I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison
I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities.
Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
Ralph Ellison
That... is how the world moves Not like an arrow but a boomerang
Ralph Ellison
The clock ticked with empty urgency as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Ralph Ellison
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
Ralph Ellison
The world is just as concrete ornery vile and sublimely wonderful as before only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
Ralph Ellison
Life is to be lived not controlled and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison
Good fiction is made of that which is real and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
Ralph Ellison
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
If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.
Elaine MacDonald
I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.
Bill Gates
I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I'm interested in sex as a way of communication, I'm not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney
I have a very open line of communication with both my children.
Gloria Estefan
I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.
Joichi Ito
Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.
Bertolt Brecht
Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.
John Warnock
To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.
Tony Robbins
Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.
Emma Thompson
It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.
Stephen Covey
The biggest lesson I've learned by living abroad for the last four years is the importance of communication.
Hidetoshi Nakata
To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.
John Marshall
We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.
Oliver Joseph Lodge
Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.
Lyndon B. Johnson
But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools.
Jesse James Garrett