Quotes from Richard Wright

was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions

They don't even let you feel what you want to feel. They after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you. They kill you before you die.

To ask a writer to deny the validity of his sensual perceptions is to ask him to be 'expedient' enough to commit spiritual suicide for the sake of politicians … My task is to weigh the effects of our civilization upon the personality, as it affects it here and now. If, in my weighing of those effects, I reveal rot, pus, filth, hate, fear, guilt, and degenerate forms of life, must I be consigned to hell?" Richard Wright, author Native Son

Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man.

This is life, new and strange; strange, because we fear it; new, because we have kept our eyes turned from it. This is life lived in cramped limits and expressing itself not in terms of our good and bad, but in terms of its own fulfilment. Men are men and life is life, and we must deal with them as they are; and if we want to change them, we must deal with them in the form in which they exist and have their being.

He murdered Mary Dalton accidentally, without thinking, without plan, without conscious motive. But, after he murdered, he accepted the crime. And that's the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight.

remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread! And they can murder for it, too! Did we not build a nation, did we not wage war and conquer in the name of a dream to realize our personalities and to make those realized personalities secure!

My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.

She'll have to learn the symbolism of the revolution," somebody said. "But why can't Communism speak a language she understands?" I asked.

What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man.

Yet he saw and felt but one life, and that one life was more than a sleep, a dream; life was all he had

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.

Jesus, take me to your blessed home above and wrap me in the bosom of thy love...

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 that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

Who knows when another accident, involving millions of men will happen, An accident that will be the dreadful day of our doom. Lodged in the heart of this moment, is the question of power which time will unfold. Your honor another civil war in these states is not impossible, and if the misunderstanding of what this boy's life means is an indication of how men of wealth and property are misreading the consciousness of the submerged millions today. One may truly come.

Having no claims upon others, I bent the way the wind blew, rendering unto my environment that which was my environment's, and rendering unto myself that which I felt was mine.

Contrite words cannot now stop profound processes which white men set in motion on this earth some four hundred years ago; four hundred years is a long time…time enough for habits, reactions, to be converted into culture, tradition, into a raison d'être for millions….

imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others.

What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity? There took shape in my mind—

Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

176 Winter rain at night Sweetening the taste of bread And spicing the soup.

The white man's God is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only God, just like the white man thinks he is the only man.

As though for purposes of renewal, he had for a time gone back into the insensible world out of which life had originally sprung, and, before he could live again, hope or plan again, a regrouping of his faculties into a new personality structure would be necessary.

All these white folks dressed so fine Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...