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 WRIGHTI didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
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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
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I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
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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.
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It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness
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All literature is protest.
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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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What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?
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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.
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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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In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
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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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The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.
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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.
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I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
RICHARD WRIGHT