I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHTI was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
RICHARD WRIGHTMake up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
RICHARD WRIGHTIt 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 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 WRIGHTOur too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.
RICHARD WRIGHTBut the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
RICHARD WRIGHTWe had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
RICHARD WRIGHTWhat could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?
RICHARD WRIGHTI endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
RICHARD WRIGHTThe 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 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 WRIGHTAll literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHTBut 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.
RICHARD WRIGHTWhenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
RICHARD WRIGHTI could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
RICHARD WRIGHTAnd they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
RICHARD WRIGHT