Richard Wright quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Richard Wright

Richard Wright Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Richard Wright on Wise Famous Quotes.

I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

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

Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.

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

You look like an accident going somewhere to happen

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.

How could one find out about life when one was about to die?

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

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

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

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

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

Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.

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

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

To see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.

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

If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.

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

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

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [ ... ].

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

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires

I'd like to see the bay cleaned up before I die.

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

I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.

A knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.

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

It's becoming very much like 1979 again.

absolute power is corrupting

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.

And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

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

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

So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.

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

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

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

You can't make me do nothing but die!

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.

The impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience.

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

All literature is protest.

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

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

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

There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.

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 ...