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.
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
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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.
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 -
We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
He 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 WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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 WRIGHT -
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there.
RICHARD WRIGHT