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83d4ab3
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Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
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Richard Wright |
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bb50ef9
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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.
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words
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Richard Wright |
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a08212b
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Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
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Richard Wright |
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84e515d
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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02dfbc9
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Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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Richard Wright |
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eccd51e
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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.
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hate
society
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Richard Wright |
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5cabfe9
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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-dr..
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Richard Wright |
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dc33455
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I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].
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Richard Wright |
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b2b3c14
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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,
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Richard Wright |
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a66e642
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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63c72df
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I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...
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feeling-alive
fighting-for-self
realization
self-worth
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Richard Wright |
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3286851
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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c59c435
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My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had..
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Richard Wright |
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c8b3809
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I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
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Richard Wright |
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4322453
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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.
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inspirational
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Richard Wright |
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a68e622
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The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
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religion
native-son
us
american
race
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Richard Wright |
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5a317b5
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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c5d94e1
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Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.
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autism-spectrum
black-and-white
conformity
right-and-wrong
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Richard Wright |
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948078c
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But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
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Richard Wright |
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68e495d
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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88cf5a0
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Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
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Richard Wright |
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cd0b9ea
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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.
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relationship
self
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Richard Wright |
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68387b7
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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.
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poverty
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Richard Wright |
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564b3be
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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
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Richard Wright |
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49a5fc7
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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a365095
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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f0b893f
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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 bl..
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pathfinder
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Richard Wright |
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2f58350
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Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.
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american-culture
superficiality
materialism
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Richard Wright |
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c2fdb29
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The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.
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Richard Wright |
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7b0596a
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My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.
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Richard Wright |
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abccc39
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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8a08790
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If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.
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self-identity
community
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Richard Wright |
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2715084
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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...
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inquiry
gratefulness
repentance
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Richard Wright |
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2153d0e
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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!
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Richard Wright |
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87c0667
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a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.
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life
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Richard Wright |
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a8a1e71
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You can't make me do nothing but die!
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freedom
death
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Richard Wright |
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7e432b2
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Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
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Richard Wright |
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5f3383f
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How could one find out about life when one was about to die?
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Richard Wright |
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8cd6259
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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...
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Richard Wright |
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7834d38
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I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is ex..
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racism
slavery
blacklivesmatter
melting-pot
racial-prejudice
lgbtqia
lgbtq
civil-rights
immigrants
immigration
racism-in-america
refugees
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Richard Wright |
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e9c0a8e
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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965bdea
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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..
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Richard Wright |
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1c8b53a
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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."
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Richard Wright |
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d823cf0
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It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.
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Richard Wright |