Richard Wright Quotes

38 quotes in 662 categories

• Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
• Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and…
• I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in…
• Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
• I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
• He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done…
• They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they…
• I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to…
• 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…
• Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
• I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...
• Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
• I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other…
• The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
• Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
• The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of…
• It's becoming very much like 1979 again.
• I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

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