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 … - Richard Wright

I was puzzled. Was there something happening next door to where I lived that I did not know? I thought I had poked my nose into every bit of conceivable business in the neighborhood; if something was being sold next door, then I certainly wanted to know about it.

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.

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.