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 WRIGHTAnything 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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 -
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 -
I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
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 -
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 -
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 -
It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
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 -
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
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 -
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 -
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
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 -
Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.
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 -
But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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 -
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 -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
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 -
Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.
RICHARD WRIGHT