Quotes from Richard Wright

How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.

She twisted from him and ran, nude, to the opposite wall. When he came at her this time §he screamed again and ran into the kitchen. She flicked on the light and stood nude amid the white refrigerator, the white gas stove, the gleaming sink, the white-topped table.

he had lived within the narrow grooves of habit so long that he had learned to see in his dark world without the aid of eyes

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.

And when I contemplated the area of No Man's Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

organic wish to cease to be, to stop living, seized him. Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which. Over and over he had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed.

Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt.

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

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. I would hurl words into the 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, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

In many instances Christianity provides Communism with its justification. Communism is paying the unpaid bills of the Christian church.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. 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.

how oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor. Then

That abandoned house, With its yard of fallen leaves, In the setting sun.

His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.

As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.   Outside

Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality—"the pivot of my life"—was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: "there were literally millions of him everywhere.

Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.

But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing...

It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.

If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.

One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With

There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.