All literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHTViolence 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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.
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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?
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Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
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Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
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I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
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I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
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They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.
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Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
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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
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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.
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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






