Quotes from Richard Wright

I looked at him and did not answer; there flashed through my mind a quick, running picture of all the squalid hovels in which I had lived and it made me feel more than ever a stranger as I stood before him. How could I have told him that I had learned to curse before I had learned to read? How could I have told him that I had been a drunkard at the age of six?

He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.

Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them ; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood ; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking...

One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds, when man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.

There would have to hover above him, like the stars in a full sky, a vast configuration of images and symbols whose magic and power could lift him up and make him live so intensely that the dread of being black and unequal would be forgotten; that even death would not matter, that it would be a victory

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.

How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?

the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath. As

If you think I'm telling tall tales, get chummy with some white cop who works in a Black Belt district and ask him for the lowdown. When

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.

There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a white problem.

What was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one's living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one's body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety.

Pale yellow sunshine fell through high windows and slashed the air.

he felt that they ruled him, even when they were far away and not thinking of him, ruled him by conditioning him in his relations to his own people. The

Even the cat smiles When the hen swallows water With back-tilted head.

In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of life, I did not and could not share their spirit.

I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.

In our blindness we have so contrived and ordered the lives of men that the moths in their hearts flutter toward ghoulish and incomprehensible flames!

But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.

I thought they was hard and I acted hard. He paused, then whimpered in confession, But I ain't hard, Mr. Max. I ain't hard even a little bit.... He rose to his feet. But.... I-I won't be crying none when they take me to that chair. But I'll b-b-be feeling inside of me like I was crying.... I'll be feeling and thinking that they didn't see me and I didn't see them....

In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.

I knew that he was using the Negro vote to control the city hall; in turn, he was engaged in vast political deals of which the Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots: I Protest This Fraud

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!

unconscious but powerful identification of violence against other human beings as the most appropriate response to the disastrous conditions of their lives.