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.
RICHARD WRIGHTPity 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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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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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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.
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It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.
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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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.
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And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
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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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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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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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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.
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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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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 was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
RICHARD WRIGHT






