Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHTWhenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHTthere 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 WRIGHTWe 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.
RICHARD WRIGHTIt 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.
RICHARD WRIGHTI was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHTI knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
RICHARD WRIGHTKill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
RICHARD WRIGHTIt 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.
RICHARD WRIGHTI made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
RICHARD WRIGHTThe 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 WRIGHTReading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHTBut the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
RICHARD WRIGHTHe had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.
RICHARD WRIGHTMake up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
RICHARD WRIGHTIt 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.
RICHARD WRIGHTIn me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
RICHARD WRIGHT