“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.… — Richard Wright Copy Share
“If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions, but to ferret out… — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
“My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.” — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense… — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
“Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it” — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had… — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a… — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
“If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That… — Richard Wright Copy Share
“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… — Richard Wright Copy Share
“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… — Richard Wright Copy Share
“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… — Richard Wright Copy Share
“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… — Richard Wright Copy Share Image
