The Outsider Quotes

“If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“The world of most men is given to them by their culture..”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“You look like an accident going somewhere to happen”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one's path; one then looks up and suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the world in a strangeness, and the more one stares blankly at the world, the stranger it looks, the more hideously frightening it seems. There is then born in one a wild, hot wish to project out upon the alien world the world that one is seeking. This wish is a hunger for power, to be in command of one's self.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“...to see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“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, The Outsider

“absolute power is corrupting”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“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, The Outsider

“He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided himself to go to sleep, but it did no good, for he was hungry for these waking visions that depicted his dilemmas, yet he knew that such brooding did not help; in fact he was wasting his waning strength, for into these unreal dramas he was putting the whole of his ardent being. The long hours dragged on.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“Why were some people fated, like Job, to live a never-ending debate between themselves and their sense of what they believed life should be? Why did some hearts feel insulted at being alive, humiliated at the terms of existence? It was as though one felt that one had been promised something and when that promise had not been kept, one felt a sense of loss that made life intolerable; it was as though one was angry, but did not know toward what or whom the anger should be directed; it was as though one felt betrayed, but could never determine the manner of the betrayal.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider