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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0fb2ef5 | Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction... | Richard Wright | ||
| 09b7634 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 482d9ec | A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rum.. | Richard Wright | ||
| a6fc77d | was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 98506d0 | the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. | Richard Wright | ||
| 7cb17f3 | I have found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth. Harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. "If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all. Fight with yourself. Because there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 821a943 | Humnnn," he grunted, then laughed. "A dog bite can't hurt a nigger." "It's swelling and it hurts," I said. "If it bothers you, let me know," he said. "But I never saw a dog yet that could really hurt a nigger." He turned and walked away and the black boys gathered to watch his tall form disappear down the aisles of wet bricks. "Sonofabitch!" "He'll get his someday!" "Boy, their hearts are hard!" "Lawd, a white man'll do anything!" | Richard Wright | ||
| f657b91 | Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come. | hate love | Richard Wright | |
| 8ac767a | 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. | back-to-africa-movement black-history black-history-month garveyites | Richard Wright | |
| c43ae88 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| f23a2ad | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| e7c6235 | 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. | labels politicians stereotypes | Richard Wright | |
| d58daa9 | He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy. | Richard Wright | ||
| d867878 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 7f77ae9 | Edno usmikhnato momche stoi sred padashchiia sniag, prostira dlani, dokato pobeleiat. | Richard Wright | ||
| 1ac5311 | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 38af8ed | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 32ed66d | He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes. | Richard Wright | ||
| ff2eea4 | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 63dd0ff | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 371cc7c | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 349f1cb | absolute power is corrupting | Richard Wright | ||
| 70f1cbc | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 0205933 | 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... | racism-in-america | Richard Wright | |
| 7177828 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 6e4d6ee | How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live? | Richard Wright | ||
| 1165c31 | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| bc54e22 | It went against human nature to truly savor every moment and continually remain aware of all they had to be grateful for. | Katrina Kittle | ||
| 097c22e | They didn't speak a word, but it was still their best conversation in a long time. | Katrina Kittle | ||
| 5ff915e | These teeth marks?" he said. "These stitches? They add to the beauty of the saddle, to the value. They announce it was worth saving. I won't replace it until it falls off in two pieces from the horse's back." | Katrina Kittle | ||
| 648a772 | Eyes glazed over as the great rice-wine parties in the highlands were recalled, parties that are no longer held since the arrival of the mission. Bario has become a good, clean, upstanding, sober, hard-working Christian community. What a loss for these fun-loving and generous people. | religion social-change | Eric Hansen | |
| 8be58e1 | The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?) | Tim O'Brien | ||
| ab03d0b | for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 63443a6 | Trump spent two years suing author Tim O'Brien and his publisher for writing that his net worth was probably not in the billions, but rather the hundreds of millions. After a court dismissed the case, Trump made it clear that he merely wanted to harass O'Brien, not necessarily win damages. "I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about," Trump bragged. It .. | David Cay Johnston | ||
| fc17b77 | I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.) | lying politics war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 400af2f | I hated him for making me stop hating him | war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 64c73aa | Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 7b6a4fe | My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| 2df1255 | He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| bb56282 | They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. | vietnam war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 14f6398 | when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead. | Tim O'Brien | ||
| a58b372 | Stories can save us. | stories the-things-they-carried tim-o-brien vietnam-war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 07c589a | I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio. | reality war | Tim O'Brien | |
| 6113809 | Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear." | Tim O'Brien |