"Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."
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Quote collection
Richard Wright quotes (page 1 of 2)
37 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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 bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness"
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"Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented."
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"Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days."
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"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 do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces."
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"But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target"
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"Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books."
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"All literature is protest."
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"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 individuality."
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"Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust."
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"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 go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive."
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"Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!"
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"I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it"
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"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 can't. It's just like livin' in jail."
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"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 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?"
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"The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination."
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"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"
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"I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom"
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"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. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books."
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"I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...]."
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