Top 92 Richard Wright Quotes
#2. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.
Richard Wright
#3. Speaking figuratively, they were soon chronic alcoholics, men who lived by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation. From
Richard Wright
#4. To see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.
Richard Wright
#5. I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [ ... ].
Richard Wright
#6. You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man ...
Richard Wright
#7. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
Richard Wright
#8. I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.
Richard Wright
#9. The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
Richard Wright
#10. Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this elementary truth and gained votes by pretending the contrary
Richard Wright
#11. A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
Richard Wright
#12. 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
#13. A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
Richard Wright
#14. The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.
Richard Wright
#15. Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
Richard Wright
#16. Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!
Richard Wright
#17. It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind.
Richard Wright
#18. Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
Richard Wright
#20. Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
Richard Wright
#21. They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.
Richard Wright
#22. The impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience.
Richard Wright
#23. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
Richard Wright
#24. I wish I could be an example to you ... "
I knew that I had conquered him, had rid myself of him mentally and emotionally; but I wanted to be sure.
"You are not an example to me; you could never be," I spat at him. "You're a warning.
Richard Wright
#25. Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
Richard Wright
#27. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.
Richard Wright
#28. I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Richard Wright
#29. Would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human
Richard Wright
#30. They lived on the surface of their days; their smiles were surface smiles, and their tears were surface tears. Negroes lived a truer and deeper life than they, but I wished that Negroes, too, could live as thoughtlessly, serenely as they.
Richard Wright
#31. What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? 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.
Richard Wright
#32. I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.
Richard Wright
#33. 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
#34. Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.
Richard Wright
#35. If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.
Richard Wright
#36. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books ...
Richard Wright
#37. The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Richard Wright
#38. I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
Richard Wright
#39. Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.
Richard Wright
#40. Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction ...
Richard Wright
#41. the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded,
Richard Wright
#43. How could one find out about life when one was about to die?
Richard Wright
#44. 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
#45. Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it
Richard Wright
#46. 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
#47. I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.
Richard Wright
#48. 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
#49. Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!
Richard Wright
#50. Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
Richard Wright
#51. It was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.
Richard Wright
#52. A knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.
Richard Wright
#53. Hen I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality
Richard Wright
#54. How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?
Richard Wright
#55. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes.
Richard Wright
#56. Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
Richard Wright
#57. Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
Richard Wright
#58. The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
Richard Wright
#59. You look like an accident going somewhere to happen
Richard Wright
#60. 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
#61. He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.
Richard Wright
#62. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
Richard Wright
#63. Did you ever feel happy in church?" "Naw. I didn't want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church." "But you are poor, Bigger."
Again Bigger's eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. "I ain't that poor.
Richard Wright
#64. It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It
Richard Wright
#65. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.
Richard Wright
#66. In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.
Richard Wright
#67. Maybe I would've been all right if I could've done something I wanted to do. I wouldn't be scared then. Or mad, maybe. I wouldn't be always hating folks; and maybe I'd feel at home, sort of.
Richard Wright
#68. There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.
Richard Wright
#69. 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
#70. In all my life - though surrounded by many people - I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.
Richard Wright
#71. I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.
Richard Wright
#72. He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.
Richard Wright
#73. Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.
Richard Wright
#74. 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
#75. I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em ...
Richard Wright
#76. 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
#77. He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.
Richard Wright
#78. 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
#79. Whether he'll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who'll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he'll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America. But,
Richard Wright
#80. If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.
Richard Wright
#81. The cross the preacher had told him about was bloody, not flaming; meek, not militant. It had made him feel awe and wonder, not fear and panic. It had made him want to kneel and cry, but this cross made him want to curse and kill.
Richard Wright
#82. The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
Richard Wright
#83. 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
#84. The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted.
Richard Wright
#85. Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
Richard Wright
#86. So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true;
Richard Wright
#88. Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires
Richard Wright
#89. I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.
Richard Wright
#90. 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
#91. My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.
Richard Wright
#92. Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
Richard Wright
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