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.
RICHARD WRIGHTIs not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?
More Richard Wright Quotes
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Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
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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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I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
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there 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
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All literature is protest.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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?
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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 was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
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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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Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.
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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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I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak,
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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.
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I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.
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At 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.
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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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Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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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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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.
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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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I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].
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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
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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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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