Quotes by Richard Wright

“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness””

“I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .I was taking a part of the Southto transplant in alien soil,to see if it could grow differently,if it could drink of new and cool rains,bend in strange winds,respond to the warmth of other sunsand, perhaps, to bloom””

“All literature is protest.””

“Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.””

“I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...””

“I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].””

“It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.””

“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.””

“I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it””

“If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.””

“I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.””

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