quotes by Richard Wright

"Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality."
— Richard Wright (Native Son (Perennial Classics))

"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

""Men can starve from a lack of self realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.""
— Richard Wright

""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 hunger for life that gnaws in us all."
"
— Richard Wright

"Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong."
— Richard Wright (Native Son (Perennial Classics))

"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 (Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth)

"...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."
— Richard Wright (Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth)

"Men can starve just as much from a lack of self realization as they can from a lack of bread."
— Richard Wright

"Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... 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."
— Richard Wright (Black Boy)

"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 (Native Son (Perennial Classics))