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 WRIGHTAt 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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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I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
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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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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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If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
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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 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.
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Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.
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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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Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there.
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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
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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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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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And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
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In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
RICHARD WRIGHT