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Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
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| Ralph Ellison
A former student of ours (I say former because he shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again) who has been expelled for a most serious defection from our strictest rules of deportment. 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. Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. Education is all a matter of building bridges. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. His name was Tod Clifton, he believed in Brotherhood, he aroused our hopes and he died. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? 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. If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. 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. 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. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. Or, as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. The truth is the light and light is the truth. The white folk tell everybody what to think – except men like me. I tell them. To Whom It May Concern: ... Keep This Nigger-Boy Running. When I discover who I am, I'll be free. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? |
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