Richard Wright quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Richard Wright

Top Richard Wright Quotes

Browse top 55 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Richard Wright.

Favorite Richard Wright Quotes

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

2. "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

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

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

5. "Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust." ~ Richard Wright

6. "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

7. "I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .I was taking a part of the Southto 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 sunsand, perhaps, to bloom" ~ Richard Wright

8. "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

9. "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

10. "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

11. "I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it" ~ Richard Wright

12. "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

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

14. "The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination." ~ Richard Wright

15. "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 hunger for life that gnaws in us all." ~ Richard Wright

16. "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

17. "Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons." ~ Richard Wright

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

19. "I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die." ~ Richard Wright

20. "I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of "Uncle Tom's Children". When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears." ~ Richard Wright

21. "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

22. "Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality." ~ Richard Wright

23. "How could one find out about life when one was about to die?" ~ Richard Wright

24. "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

25. "But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape." ~ Richard Wright

26. "Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?" ~ Richard Wright

27. "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. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life." ~ Richard Wright

28. "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

29. "...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

30. "From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing." ~ Richard Wright

31. "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

32. "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

33. "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

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

35. "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

36. "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

37. "The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us." ~ Richard Wright

38. "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

39. "Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man..." ~ Richard Wright

40. "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

41. "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

42. "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

43. "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

44. "..when 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

45. "Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway." ~ Richard Wright

46. "... a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die." ~ Richard Wright

47. "And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him." ~ Richard Wright

48. "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

49. "If the stars twinkled more than usual on any given night, it meant that the angels in heaven were happy and were flitting across the doors of heaven; and since stars were merely holes ventilating heaven, the twinkling came from the angels flitting past the holes that admitted air into the holy home of God." ~ Richard Wright

50. "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? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?" ~ Richard Wright

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