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 WRIGHTReluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
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 -
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 -
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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 -
It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.
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 -
But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
RICHARD WRIGHT -
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
All literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom
RICHARD WRIGHT -
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
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 -
The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.
RICHARD WRIGHT