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Exlpore more American quotes
"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
"Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are."
"We don't start a job that we can't finish... that's the American way."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy."
"Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."
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