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 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.
More Richard Wright Quotes
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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.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I 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 WRIGHT -
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 -
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 WRIGHT -
I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
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 -
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
RICHARD WRIGHT -
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness.
RICHARD WRIGHT -
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.
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.
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We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.
RICHARD WRIGHT