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 WRIGHTI 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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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 -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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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 -
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHT