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 WRIGHT
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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.
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 -
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
RICHARD WRIGHT -
But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
RICHARD WRIGHT -
And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
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 -
All literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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 -
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 -
What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.
RICHARD WRIGHT