Richard Wright Quotes

38 quotes in 662 categories

• Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
• Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.
• 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…
• Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us…
• Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied…
• Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in…
• Goddamnit, 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…
• Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger…
• I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].
• It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense…
• It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.…
• I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath…
• If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
• Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If…
• At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living…
• But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
• All literature is protest.
• I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not…
• It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of…
• 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…

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