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Richard Wright

130 quotes

“Often, when perplexed, I longed to be like the smiling, lazy, forgetful black boys in the noisy hotel locker rooms, with no torrential conflicts to resolve. Many times I grew weary of the secret burden I carried and longed to cast it down, either in action or in resignation. But I was not made to be a resigned man and I had only a limited choice of actions, and I was afraid of all of them.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her in amazement. It was on reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all human beings were not mean and driving, were not bigots like the members of my family.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later I came awake with a sudden start, remembering the fright and tension that had accompanied my foray into crime. Well, all that was gone now. I could start anew. I did not like to feel tension and fear. I wanted something else, to be human, to be caught up in something meaningful.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later, after I had grown to understand the peasant mentality of Bess and her mother, I learned the full degree to which my life at home had cut me off, not only from white people but from Negroes as well. To Bess and her mother, money was important, but they did not strive for it too hard. They had no tensions, unappeasable longings, no desire to do something to redeem themselves. The main value in their lives was simple, clean, good living and when they thought they had found those same qualities in one of their race, they instinctively embraced him, liked him, and asked no questions.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had no hope whatever of being a professional man. Not only had I been so conditioned that I did not desire it, but the fulfillment of such an ambition was beyond my capabilities. Well-to-do Negroes lived in a world that was almost as alien to me as the world inhabited by whites.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A dim notion of what life meant to a Negro in America was coming to consciousness in me, not in terms of external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities, but in terms of crossed-up feeling, of psyche pain. I sensed that Negro life was a sprawling land of unconscious suffering, and there were but few Negroes who knew the meaning of their lives, who could tell their story.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(The essence of the irony of the plight of the Negro in America, to me, is that he is doomed to live in isolation while those who condemn him seek the basest goals of any people on the face of the earth. Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high, sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him, and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in his soul.)”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not act in this fashion deliberately; I did not prefer this kind of relationship with people. I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most valued pleasure of the people I knew was a car, the most cherished experience a bottle of whisky, the most sought-after prize somebody else’s wife. 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.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I spent my nights reading Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman’s epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before my eyes made me feel that I never could.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though I had never had any assignments from a college professor, I had made much harder and more prolonged attempts at self-expression than any of them. Swearing love for art, they hovered on the edge of Bohemian life. Always friendly, they could never be anybody’s friend; always reading, they could really never learn; always boasting of their passions, they could never really feel and were afraid to live.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Communism, instead of making them leap forward with fire in their hearts to become masters of ideas and life, had frozen them at an even lower level of ignorance than had been theirs before they met Communism.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He took me to an office and introduced me to a Jewish boy who was to become one of the nation’s leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers of his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation, to a young Jewish boy who was destined to film the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was meeting men and women whom I would know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained relationships in my life.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During the following days I learned through discreet questioning that I had seemed a fantastic element to the black Communists. I was shocked to hear that I, who had been only to grammar school, had been classified as an intellectual. What was an intellectual? I had never heard the word used in the sense in which it was applied to me.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I found that when I talked to them in abstract terms, my ideas were not understood. The irony of it was that I, who had all but to steal books to read, had been branded as an intellectual by the one group that claimed it was dedicated to educating the oppressed and informing them with a vision of life.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What a weird experience I had had! At no time had I felt at home in the Communist party. I had always felt that the possibility was there, but always I was not quite sure of the motives of the people with whom I worked and they never seemed quite sure of mine. My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty. But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my blood and bones.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it had enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist party.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I headed toward home alone, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life. Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness. I would try, not because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to if I were to live at all.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; ... it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it ... I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experience I have fallen heir to.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation be extended now to all men?”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[As] the tide of white domination of the land mass of Asia and Africa recedes, there lies exposed to view a procession of shattered cultures, disintegrated societies, and a writhing sweep of more aggressive, irrational religion than the world has known for centuries.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What vision must Negro writers have before their eyes in order to feel the impelling necessity for an about face? What angle of vision can show them all the forces of modern society in process, all the lines of economic development converging toward a distant point of hope? Must they believe in some `ism'? ("Blueprint" 45)”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perspective is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people. There are times when he may stand too close and the result is a blurred vision. Or he may stand too far away and the result is a neglect of important things.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must confess that this is no personal achievement of mine; this attitude was never striven for. . . . [ellipsis is in original, unabridged text] I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experiences that I have fallen heir to. I say this neither in a tone of apology nor to persuade the reader in my ideological direction, but to give him a hinting clue as to why certain ideas and values appeal to me more than others, and why certain perspectives are stressed in these speeches.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a protective mechanism, I developed a terse, cynical mode of speech that rebuffed those who sought to get too close to me. Conversation was my way of avoiding expression; my words were reserved for those times when I sat down alone to write. My face was always a deadpan or a mask of general friendliness; no word or event could jar me into a gesture of enthusiasm or despair.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had fled a world that he had known and that had emotionally crucified him, but what was he here in this world whose impact loosed storms in his blood? Could he ever make the white faces around him understand how they had charged his world with images of beckoning desire and dread? Naw, naw…No one could believe the kind of life he had lived and was living.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“.... Above all, he was ashamed of his world, for the world about him had branded his world as bad, inferior. Moreover, he felt no moral strength or compulsion to defend his world. That in him which had always made him self-conscious was now the bud of a new possible life that was pressing ardently but timidly against the shell of the old to shatter it and be free.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm an American Negro; as such, I've had a burden of race consciousness. So have these people. I worked in my youth as a common laborer, and I've had a class consciousness. So have these people. I grew up in the Methodist and Seventh Day Adventist churches and I saw and observed religion in my childhood; and these people are religious. I was a member of the Communist Party for twelve years and I know something of the politics and psychology of rebellion.... These emotions are my instruments.... I want to try to use these emotions to try to find out what these people feel and think and why.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am nobody: A red sinking autumn sun Took my name away.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I give permission For this slow spring rain to soak The violet beds.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With a twitching nose A dog reads a telegram On a wet tree trunk.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Burning autumn leaves, I yearn to make the bonfire Bigger and bigger.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sleepless spring night: Yearning for what I never had And for what never was.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a drizzling rain, In a flower shop’s doorway, A girl sells herself”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A slow autumn rain: The sad eyes of my mother Fill a lonely night.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more.... [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space.... Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, the money, and the typewriter were all on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him. They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe anything's right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture.He straightened with a start. What was happening to him? ... He was going to do something, but what? Yes, he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some nameless thing.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He would go there and clear up everything, make a statement. What statement? He did not know. He was the statement, and since it was all so clear to him, surely he would be able to make it clear to others.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where could he find such experiences, such spheres of existence? In the main, he accepted the kind of world that the Bible claimed existed; but, for the sufferings, terrors, accidental births, and meaningless deaths of that world, he rejected the Biblical prescriptions of repentance, prayer, faith and grace. He was persuaded that what started on this earth had to be rounded off and somehow finished here.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moment we act as if it's true, then it's true.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, Christ their disease had reached out and claimed him too. He had been subverted by the contagion of the lawless; he had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't think I'm so odd and strange ... I'm not.... I'm legion ... I've lived alone, but I'm everywhere.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing.... Alone a man is nothing.....I wish I had some way to give the meaning of my life to others.... To make a bridge from man to man.... We must find some way of being good to ourselves.... Man is all we've got.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Richard went to Paris in 1946, when I was 22, he was 38. Now, it took me a long time; I had to get to be much older to realize something. I didn't realize it that day at all. I was not born in Mississippi; I was born in New York. And I did not leave Mississippi to go to Chicago. And endure all that. I was much too young to realize what I was looking at really. But, that's a journey. To go from Mississippi to Chicago to New York to Paris in 38 years is amazing. You might as well have walked all that distance, it's almost that remarkable.”
Richard Wright (1908–1960) said by 1960 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James Baldwin at Yale University (2 November 1983)