Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?
RICHARD WRIGHTNo 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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 -
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
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 -
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
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 -
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 -
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 WRIGHT -
We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like livin’ in jail.
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 did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
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 -
We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
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 -
And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
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 -
I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
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 -
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 -
Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.
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 -
Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world.
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 -
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 -
It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.
RICHARD WRIGHT