Richard Wright Quotes

My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them.

Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?

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.

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

Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain… I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal. 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 the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

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.

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?

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.

If I should say that he is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate. Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them, the condemning sense of guilt. And this is true of all men- whether they be white or black -it is a peculiar and powerful, but common need.

And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world's attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own.

He was not satisfied with the way things stood now; he was a man who had come in sight of a goal, then had won it, and in winning it had seen just within his grasp another goal, higher, greater. He had learned to shout and had shouted and no ear had heard him; he had just learned to walk and was walking but could not see the ground beneath his feel; he had long been yearning for weapons to hold in his hands and suddenly found that his hands held weapons that were invisible.

On our way home she would not utter a single word. I walked anxiously beside her, looking at her tired old white face, the wrinkles that lined her neck, the deep, waiting black eyes, and the frail body, and I knew more than she thought I knew about the meaning of religion, the hunger of the human heart for that which is not and can never be, the thirst of the human spirit to conquer and transcend the implacable limitations of human life.

Richard Wright’s outstanding characteristics are two seemingly opposite tendencies. One is an overwhelming need for association and integration with humanity at large. The other is a tragic, highly individualized loneliness. Except that he is a Negro in 20th century America he might have been a lyric poet. Whenever he describes the life he wants for mankind he rises to great heights of lyric beauty. At the same time when he doubts that a new life can ever be achieved he writes with the same beauty but in tragic despair. Wright wants a new world; men working freely together in social relationships that not only realize a complete personality but develop every potential and result in new associations and new men altogether. He wants to share a common life, not in a regimented sense but in a free interchange of ideas and experience; a relationship which will be the blending of a common belief and a solidarity of ideals. He wants a life in which basic emotions are shared; in which common memory forms a common past; in which collective hope reflects a national future. He has a vision of life where man can reveal his destiny as man by grappling with the world and getting from it the satisfactions he feels he must have. He wants a life where man’s inmost nature and emotional capacities will be used. He has a passionate longing to belong, to be identified with the world at large; he wants the "deep satisfaction of doing a good job in common with others." He doesn’t want a society where he is separate as Negro, but one where he is just another man.

'If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it,' I told him. He heard me but he did not speak. I wanted to say more to him, but I knew that it would have been useless. Though older than I, he had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible…Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.