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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0aeb119 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 892f473 | He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike. | humourous humourous-quote | Richard Wright | |
| cac1eb8 | 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.. | american-culture american-dream | Richard Wright | |
| 4806324 | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| b4d315a | if I can't write poetry, at least perhaps I can try to think and feel like a poet. | Richard B. Wright | ||
| 7317ad1 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 5601532 | 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 .. | emotional strength | Richard Wright | |
| 9b3bca8 | We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours. | history oppression racism | Richard Wright | |
| fe005cc | This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer's Cane than to Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| bff8a69 | 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. | coping-mechanisms coping-skills terror the-devil-that-you-know trying-new-things | Richard Wright | |
| d761357 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 381155d | Dewdrop joins dewdrop Till a petal holds a pool Reflecting its rose. | Richard Wright | ||
| cc97b0f | 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.. | oblivious obliviousness working-class | Richard Wright | |
| befcca9 | There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action. | Richard Wright | ||
| 9ce750f | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 5d7e6d1 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| c61af73 | 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; | Richard Wright | ||
| a2137e6 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 1b7af55 | 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.. | on-writing swooning-over-sentences writing-advice writing-process | Richard Wright | |
| dcd061d | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 500ad86 | One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With | Richard Wright | ||
| 0dbcbf6 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 15976e7 | It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness. The friends I had, growing up and going to work, grew more bitter every day; and, conversely, they learned to hide this bitterness and to fit into the pattern Gentile and Jew a.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 16f8c43 | 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" | Richard Wright | ||
| 8724972 | 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! | Richard Wright | ||
| 60f0f7c | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 601f6c2 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 0959aa0 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 8a08bde | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 0015396 | 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.. | Richard Wright | ||
| 4f10a50 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 399c8fe | 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. | contemplation literature | Richard Wright | |
| 45a64d6 | Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure. | Richard Wright | ||
| 60440f9 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 2233196 | 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, | Richard Wright | ||
| eb8d4ef | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| ca0fd90 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| a170c6b | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 1c489fb | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 428ef7d | 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." | Richard Wright | ||
| e9e32c7 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 9975340 | 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. | Richard Wright | ||
| 7dddc07 | 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 | Richard Wright | ||
| 81f60c1 | We recognize the people we love no matter how much they change. | Barbara Haworth-Attard |