63 quotes
The truth is the light and light is the truth.
Invisible Man (1952)
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Invisible Man (1952)
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
Invisible Man (1952)
And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.
Invisible Man (1952)
Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word.
Invisible Man (1952)
A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Invisible Man (1952)
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Invisible Man (1952)
Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
Richard Wright's Blues (1945)
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.
Invisible Man (1952)
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
Invisible Man (1952)
Commercial rock ’n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
Some Questions and Some Answers (1958)
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
Remembering Jimmy (1958)
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.
Invisible Man (1952)
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
Invisible Man (1952)
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
Invisible Man (1952)
Play the game, but don't believe in it.
Invisible Man (1952)
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.
Invisible Man (1952)