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Richard Wright Quotes

1908–1960 United States

Richard Nathaniel Wright (4 September 1908 – 28 November 1960) was an American novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction.

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Random Richard Wright quote

39 quotes

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed.

Black Boy (1945)

He was sitting in a white home; dim lights burned round him; strange objects challenged him; and he was feeling angry and uncomfortable.

Native Son (1940)

"And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millions of people and hope to be administered successfully?"

Native Son (1940)

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

Native Son (1940)

How can the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation be extended now to all men?

White Man, Listen! (1957)

I would say that Dick was my closest friend. We had a small group, Dick Wright, Chester Himes and myself and we lived and enjoyed French life.

"The moment we act as if it's true, then it's true."

The Outsider (1953)

"You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge."

The Outsider (1953)

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

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

Native Son (1940)

Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.

Native Son (1940)

He came like a sledgehammer, like a giant out of the mountain with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer...

I give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

He was much more stern and realistic than I tend to be. I'm not unrealistic, except in the sense that some things are so unpleasant I need to alter them a bit.

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.

American Hunger (1977)

I had no sense of being inferior or superior to the people about me; I merely felt that they had had no chance to learn to live differently. I never criticized them or praised them, yet they felt in my neutrality a deeper rejection of them than if I had cursed them.

Native Son (1940)

A slow autumn rain:
The sad eyes of my mother
Fill a lonely night.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Wright (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.