Richard Wright quotes

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
-- Richard Wright

#Integrity #Men #Self

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. 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

#Blood #Long #Suffering

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. 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

#White #Jail #Black

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
-- Richard Wright

#Loyalty #Devotion #Love Grows

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
-- Richard Wright

#Leaving #Might #Forget

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. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
-- Richard Wright

#Book #Support #Alive

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.
-- Richard Wright

#Expression #Individuality #Violence

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
-- Richard Wright

#Hate #Play #Feelings

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.
-- Richard Wright

#Inference #Evidence

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, 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. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, 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

#Heart #Night #Air

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
-- Richard Wright

#Reading #Dope #Drug

Our 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, 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. 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
-- Richard Wright

#Lonely #Self #White

All literature is protest.
-- Richard Wright

#Literature #Protest

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
-- Richard Wright

#Book #Support #Environment

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
-- Richard Wright

#Together #Cry #Reason

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

#Night #Elbows #Wake Up

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, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.
-- Richard Wright

#World #Sake #Environment

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? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?
-- Richard Wright

#Heart #Men #Civilization

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
-- Richard Wright

#Color #Skins #Target

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But 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 Wright

#Hurt #Hate #Feelings

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. 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

#Attitude #Peaceful #Feelings

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom
-- Richard Wright

#Rain #Wind #Leaving

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].
-- Richard Wright

#Stories

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, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
-- Richard Wright

#Knowing #Awful #Another Chance

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...
-- Richard Wright

#Life #Alive #World

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. [...] It had been only through books - at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions - that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value.
-- Richard Wright

#Book #Support #Alive

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
-- Richard Wright

#Believe #Feelings #Looks

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

#Country #People #African American

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 Wright

#Believe #Character #Feelings

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

#Lying #Men #Faces

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
-- Richard Wright

#House #Mind #Half

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

#Drama #Feelings #Answers