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 WRIGHTMen can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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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I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
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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.
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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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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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We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
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Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?
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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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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 -
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 -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
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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.
RICHARD WRIGHT