The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

He sighed; yes, they were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying. . . .

Woke?

she loved me; eternity was so real to her that human life had an air of unreality.

My grandmother was an enemy of all books save those based upon or derived from the Bible.

I’ve heard parents express horror at their children listening to crime stories on the radio; yet on Sunday mornings they never hesitate to send them off to Sunday school to hear the most horrific story of all. . . .)

To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

But if you accuse a man of something that he did not do, his behavior will be utterly unpredictable. It has the power of upsetting his entire way of life, coloring his feelings about people for a lifetime, and sowing the seeds of distrust so deep that they will grow and bear fruit for years afterwards.

Otherness. All members of oppressed minorities hold an innate understanding of it.