Quotes About Identity

From the movies that you watch to the songs on your radio. Down to the magazines placed ever so neatly in the grocery house, you know the ones with the movie stars. Since they wouldn't make any money if you already loved who you are. See there is no profit in saying you're already perfect and beautiful too.

materialism takes root in early childhood, and is driven mainly by low self-esteem.

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?

when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality

it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.

Did you ever feel happy in church? Naw. I didn't want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger. Again Bigger's eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain't that poor.

Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

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 the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing.

America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.) Granny

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind.

There would have to hover above him, like the stars in a full sky, a vast configuration of images and symbols whose magic and power could lift him up and make him live so intensely that the dread of being black and unequal would be forgotten; that even death would not matter, that it would be a victory

he felt that they ruled him, even when they were far away and not thinking of him, ruled him by conditioning him in his relations to his own people. The

In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of life, I did not and could not share their spirit.

I thought they was hard and I acted hard. He paused, then whimpered in confession, But I ain't hard, Mr. Max. I ain't hard even a little bit.... He rose to his feet. But.... I-I won't be crying none when they take me to that chair. But I'll b-b-be feeling inside of me like I was crying.... I'll be feeling and thinking that they didn't see me and I didn't see them....

Maybe I would've been all right if I could've done something I wanted to do. I wouldn't be scared then. Or mad, maybe. I wouldn't be always hating folks; and maybe I'd feel at home, sort of.

And when I contemplated the area of No Man's Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality—"the pivot of my life"—was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: "there were literally millions of him everywhere.

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

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—

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.

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

In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could not share their spirit.