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16f8c43
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The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever," Howe declared. "It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture." A"
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Richard Wright |
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8724972
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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!
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Richard Wright |
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60f0f7c
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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601f6c2
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Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though
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Richard Wright |
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0959aa0
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They wouldn't let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain't fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn't want to kill.
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Richard Wright |
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8a08bde
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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0015396
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I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me, but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard. What was it that ma..
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Richard Wright |
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4f10a50
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Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this. Yes; he would send the kidnap note. He would jar them out of their senses. When
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Richard Wright |
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399c8fe
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I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.
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contemplation
literature
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Richard Wright |
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45a64d6
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Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.
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Richard Wright |
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60440f9
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It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It
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Richard Wright |
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2233196
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Whether he'll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who'll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he'll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America. But,
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Richard Wright |
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eb8d4ef
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It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind.
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Richard Wright |
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ca0fd90
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There are times, Your Honor, when reality bears features of such an impellingly moral complexion that it is impossible to follow the hewn path of expediency. There are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed.
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Richard Wright |
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a170c6b
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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
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Richard Wright |
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1c489fb
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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428ef7d
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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."
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Richard Wright |
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e9e32c7
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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
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Richard Wright |
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9975340
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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7dddc07
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You're trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind. His feelings drag him forward and his mind, full of what others say about him, tells him to go back
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Richard Wright |
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4388d64
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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 only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what othe..
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Richard Wright |
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b3cec70
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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.
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Richard Wright |
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673ada2
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These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion. 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 ..
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Richard Wright |
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a2d5dd4
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My mother's suffering grew into as 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 ha..
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Richard Wright |
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c49b9f8
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At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, 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 suffer..
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Richard Wright |
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4b57959
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Color hate defined the place of black life as below that of white life; and the black man, responding to the same dreams as the white man, strove to bury within his heart his awareness of this difference because it made him lonely and afraid. Heated by whites and being an organic part of the culture that hated him, the black man grew in turn to hate in himslef that which others hated in him. But pride would make him hide his self-hate, for ..
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Richard Wright |
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6c6485e
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I did not act in this fashion deliberately; I did not prefer this kind of relationship with people. I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future. But I knew that no such thing was possible in my environment. The only ways in which I felt that my feelings could go ..
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Richard Wright |
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95f5c53
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176 Winter rain at night Sweetening the taste of bread And spicing the soup.
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richard-wright
winter-rain-at-night
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Richard Wright |
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24da22a
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I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, 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 this darkness and wait for an echo, and if a..
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Richard Wright |
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fa0ec31
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A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
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Richard Wright |
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ceb02ad
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Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the lame lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: "Be like us and we will like you, maybe." It said: "If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone."
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communism
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Richard Wright |
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422456b
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Sweep away the clouds And let a dome of blue sky Give this sea a name!
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Richard Wright |
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ab4dbcf
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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.
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writers-life
writers-on-reading
writers-on-writing
writers-quotes
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Richard Wright |
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63a3d21
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That abandoned house, With its yard of fallen leaves, In the setting sun.
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Richard Wright |
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5381245
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Even the cat smiles When the hen swallows water With back-tilted head.
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Richard Wright |
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f3bd194
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I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.
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Richard Wright |
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dff8b7e
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in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance. There"
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Richard Wright |
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484c8c7
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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
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Richard Wright |
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65bf902
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Over spring mountains A star ends the paragraph Of a thunderstorm.
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Richard Wright |
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f11303f
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Ovunque, nella mia vita, io abbia incontrato la religione, ho trovato la discordia, il tentativo di un individuo o di un gruppo di dominare un altro in nome di Dio.
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Richard Wright |
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79adf50
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If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it.
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Richard Wright |
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25e90d7
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Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.
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Richard Wright |
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2328142
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Pale yellow sunshine fell through high windows and slashed the air.
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Richard Wright |
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93fd366
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How can the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation be extended now to all men?
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Richard Wright |