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 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 could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
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Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.
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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.
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Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
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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.
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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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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 the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
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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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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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We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite.
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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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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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Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there.
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I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
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Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.
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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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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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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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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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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.
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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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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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Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world.
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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
RICHARD WRIGHT