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8ac767a
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Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished.
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back-to-africa-movement
garveyites
black-history-month
black-history
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Richard Wright |
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c43ae88
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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f23a2ad
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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e7c6235
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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.
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stereotypes
labels
politicians
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Richard Wright |
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d58daa9
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He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.
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Richard Wright |
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d867878
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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
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Richard Wright |
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7f77ae9
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Edno usmikhnato momche stoi sred padashchiia sniag, prostira dlani, dokato pobeleiat.
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Richard Wright |
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1ac5311
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My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever. My spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind because I felt completely helpless in the face of this threat that might come upon me at any time, and because there did not exist to my knowledge any possible course of action which could have saved me if I had ever been confronted with a white mob. My fantasies were a moral bulwark that enabled me to feel I was keeping my emotional integri..
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Richard Wright |
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38af8ed
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These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization--the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.
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Richard Wright |
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32ed66d
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He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.
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Richard Wright |
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ff2eea4
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He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white girl, a girl whose family was known to all of them. Yes; if he did that a look of startled horror would come over their faces. But, no. He would not do that, even though the satisfaction would be keen. He was so greatly outnumbered that he would be arrested, tried, and executed. He wanted the keen thrill of startling them, but felt that the cost was too g..
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Richard Wright |
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63dd0ff
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I didn't want to kill!" Bigger shouted. "But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder....What I killed for must've been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. "It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something....I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em....It's the truth, Mr. Max. I can sa..
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Richard Wright |
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371cc7c
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As he stumbled along a high bright object caught his eyes; he looked up. Atop a building across the street, above the heads of the people, loomed a flaming cross. At once he knew that it had something to do with him. But why should they burn a cross? As he gazed at it he remembered the sweating face of the black preacher in his cell that morning talking intensely and solemnly of Jesus, of there being a cross for him, a cross for everyone, a..
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Richard Wright |
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349f1cb
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absolute power is corrupting
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Richard Wright |
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70f1cbc
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Naw. But I just can't get used to it," Bigger said. "I swear to God I can't. I know I oughtn't think about it, but I can't help it. Every time I think about it I feel like somebody's poking a red-hot iron down my throat. Goddammit, 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 living in jail. Half the time I feel like I'm on the outside of the world..
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Richard Wright |
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0205933
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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...
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racism-in-america
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Richard Wright |
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7177828
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Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible. He
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Richard Wright |
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6e4d6ee
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How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?
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Richard Wright |
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1165c31
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I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an American type. I would smile when I saw him lugging his golf bags into the office. I had always felt a vast distance separating me from the boss, and now I felt closer to him, though still distant. I felt now that I knew him, that I c..
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Richard Wright |
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4918403
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America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from on..
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Richard Wright |
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a5f345e
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quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella's room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land. One
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Richard Wright |
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2ef73d2
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I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what ..
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Richard Wright |
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d0e0adf
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As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives 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 represent..
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Richard Wright |
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6e5c4f8
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She twisted from him and ran, nude, to the opposite wall. When he came at her this time SShe 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.
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Richard Wright |
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0aeb119
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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892f473
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He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.
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humourous-quote
humourous
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Richard Wright |
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cac1eb8
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I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that i would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, th..
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american-culture
american-dream
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Richard Wright |
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4806324
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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 my life, I did not and could not share their spirit. (After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how..
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Richard Wright |
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7317ad1
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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
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Richard Wright |
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5601532
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He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided himself to go to sleep, but it did no good, for he was hungry for these waking visions that depicted his dilemmas, yet he knew that such brooding did not help; in fact he was wasting his waning strength, for into these ..
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strength
emotional
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Richard Wright |
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9b3bca8
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We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.
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racism
history
oppression
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Richard Wright |
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bff8a69
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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.
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coping-mechanisms
coping-skills
the-devil-that-you-know
trying-new-things
terror
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Richard Wright |
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d761357
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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
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Richard Wright |
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381155d
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Dewdrop joins dewdrop Till a petal holds a pool Reflecting its rose.
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Richard Wright |
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cc97b0f
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Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no go..
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obliviousness
working-class
oblivious
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Richard Wright |
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befcca9
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There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.
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Richard Wright |
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9ce750f
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The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions to this hostility fed upon itself, grew or diminished according to the news that reached me about the whites, according to what I aspired or hoped for. Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my per..
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Richard Wright |
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5d7e6d1
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He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear
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Richard Wright |
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c61af73
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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;
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Richard Wright |
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a2137e6
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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1b7af55
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I would write: "The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam." Or: "The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream." "The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers." My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment whi..
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swooning-over-sentences
writing-advice
on-writing
writing-process
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Richard Wright |
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dcd061d
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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
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Richard Wright |
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500ad86
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One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With
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Richard Wright |
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0dbcbf6
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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.
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Richard Wright |