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 ne… - Richard Wright

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.

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.

“That’s all right,” he said. “But when you’re through reading those books, I want you to tell me what you get out of them.” That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this?