Top 90 Richard Wright Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.”

— Richard Wright

52. “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.”

— Richard Wright

53. “Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them ; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood ; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking...”

— Richard Wright

54. “So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true;.”

— Richard Wright

55. “I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.”

— Richard Wright

56. “Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are doing down the same drain...”

— Richard Wright

57. “A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man’s consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.”

— Richard Wright

58. “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...”

— Richard Wright

59. “The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.”

— Richard Wright

60. “Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though.”

— Richard Wright

61. “His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.”

— Richard Wright

62. “They wouldn’t let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain’t fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn’t want to kill.”

— Richard Wright

63. “But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.”

— Richard Wright

64. “Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished.”

— Richard Wright

65. “How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?”

— Richard Wright

66. “Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this elementary truth and gained votes by pretending the contrary.”

— Richard Wright

67. “Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible. He.”

— Richard Wright

68. “In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.”

— Richard Wright

69. “One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With.”

— Richard Wright

70. “These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization – the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.”

— Richard Wright

71. “Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.”

— Richard Wright

72. “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.”

— Richard Wright

73. “In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.”

— Richard Wright

74. “He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.”

— Richard Wright

75. “Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others’ hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”

— Richard Wright

76. “The cross the preacher had told him about was bloody, not flaming; meek, not militant. It had made him feel awe and wonder, not fear and panic. It had made him want to kneel and cry, but this cross made him want to curse and kill.”

— Richard Wright

77. “Pale yellow sunshine fell through high windows and slashed the air.”

— Richard Wright

78. “Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...”

— Richard Wright

79. “One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds, when man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.”

— Richard Wright

80. “How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.”

— Richard Wright

81. “If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I’d do it. But I don’t believe anything can stop it.”

— Richard Wright

82. “Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.”

— Richard Wright

83. “A writer who hasn’t written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.”

— Richard Wright

84. “Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstance into account?”

— Richard Wright

85. “Ovunque, nella mia vita, io abbia incontrato la religione, ho trovato la discordia, il tentativo di un individuo o di un gruppo di dominare un altro in nome di Dio.”

— Richard Wright

86. “While his mother sank in his eyes into the embodiment of passivity and victimization, he found it almost impossible to forge warm ties with other human beings.”

— Richard Wright

87. “But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing...”

— Richard Wright

88. “To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.”

— Richard Wright

89. “It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It.”

— Richard Wright

90. “Speaking figuratively, they were soon chronic alcoholics, men who lived by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation. From.”

— Richard Wright

91. “As the importance of ideology declined, I began to feel that maybe ideology was a weapon that suited only certain hostile conditions of life.”

— Richard Wright

92. “The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”

— Richard Wright

93. “In our blindness we have so contrived and ordered the lives of men that the moths in their hearts flutter toward ghoulish and incomprehensible flames!”

— Richard Wright

94. “George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright’s own time, William Faulkner.”

— Richard Wright

95. “What was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one’s living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one’s body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety.”

— Richard Wright

96. “If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.”

— Richard Wright

97. “Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt.”

— Richard Wright

98. “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.”

— Richard Wright

99. “An organic wish to cease to be, to stop living, seized him. Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which. Over and over he had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed.”

— Richard Wright