Top 90 Richard Wright Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “All literature is protest.”

— Richard Wright

2. “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

— Richard Wright

3. “Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.”

— Richard Wright

Featured in: Loyalty Quotes

4. “Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”

— Richard Wright

5. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”

— Richard Wright

Featured in: Reading Quotes

6. “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 standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.”

— Richard Wright

7. “Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.”

— Richard Wright

8. “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 of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.”

— Richard Wright

9. “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 words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

— Richard Wright

10. “But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.”

— Richard Wright

11. “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.”

— Richard Wright

12. “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.”

— Richard Wright

Featured in: Country Quotes

13. “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em...”

— Richard Wright

14. “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 wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.”

— Richard Wright

15. “The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”

— Richard Wright

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

— Richard Wright

17. “I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it.”

— Richard Wright

18. “If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.”

— Richard Wright

19. “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 look of the world different.”

— Richard Wright

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!”

— Richard Wright

21. “Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.”

— Richard Wright

22. “The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted.”

— Richard Wright

23. “I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.”

— Richard Wright

24. “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.”

— Richard Wright

25. “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...”

— Richard Wright

26. “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.”

— Richard Wright

27. “The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.”

— Richard Wright

28. “You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...”

— Richard Wright

29. “If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.”

— Richard Wright

30. “I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.”

— Richard Wright

31. “In all my life – though surrounded by many people – I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.”

— Richard Wright

32. “Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.”

— Richard Wright

33. “Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.”

— Richard Wright

34. “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.”

— Richard Wright

35. “At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.”

— Richard Wright

36. “I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.”

— Richard Wright

37. “There are times, Your Honor, when reality bears features of such an impellingly moral complexion that it is impossible to follow the hewn path of expediency. 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.”

— Richard Wright

38. “I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.”

— Richard Wright

39. “If the stars twinkled more than usual on any given night, it meant that the angels in heaven were happy and were flitting across the doors of heaven; and since stars were merely holes ventilating heaven, the twinkling came from the angels flitting past the holes that admitted air into the holy home of God.”

— Richard Wright

40. “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.”

— Richard Wright

41. “Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.”

— Richard Wright

42. “He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear.”

— Richard Wright

43. “He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.”

— Richard Wright

44. “You’re trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? 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. His feelings drag him forward and his mind, full of what others say about him, tells him to go back.”

— Richard Wright

45. “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 recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.”

— Richard Wright

46. “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.”

— Richard Wright

47. “If you think I’m telling tall tales, get chummy with some white cop who works in a Black Belt district and ask him for the lowdown. When.”

— Richard Wright

48. “I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. 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 look of the world different.”

— Richard Wright

49. “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.”

— Richard Wright

50. “It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.”

— Richard Wright