Richard Wright Quotes

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.

Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.

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.

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.

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

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.

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

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.

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.