there are times when life’s ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed
RICHARD WRIGHTThe artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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All literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
A mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
RICHARD WRIGHT -
No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?
RICHARD WRIGHT -
What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
You usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.
RICHARD WRIGHT