13 quotes
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)
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Native Son (1940)
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)
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)
But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.
Native Son (1940)
I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I every wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.
Native Son (1940)
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.
Native Son (1940)
"Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.
Native Son (1940)
These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger- like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force.
Native Son (1940)
“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."
Native Son (1940)
They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.
Native Son (1940)