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Richard Wright Quotes (1908-1960)
Author, Writer, Novelist
About Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright (4 September 1908 β 28 November 1960) was an American novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction.
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βWith a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.β
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.β
βI give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.β
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.β
βBurning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.β
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.β
βI am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.β
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.β
βHow can the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation be extended now to all men?β
βMen can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.β
βThe white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.β
βIn a drizzling rain,
In a flower shopβs doorway,
A girl sells herselfβ
In a flower shopβs doorway,
A girl sells herselfβ
β"Don't think I'm so odd and strange ... I'm not.... I'm legion ... I've lived alone, but I'm everywhere."β
βHe was sitting in a white home; dim lights burned round him; strange objects challenged him; and he was feeling angry and uncomfortable.β
βI soon made myself a nuisance by asking far too many questions of everybody. Every happening in the neighborhood, no matter how trivial, became my business.β
βHe was much more stern and realistic than I tend to be. I'm not unrealistic, except in the sense that some things are so unpleasant I need to alter them a bit.β
βI 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.β
ββGoddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail."β
βViolence 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.β
β"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."β
βBut he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.β
β"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?"β
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Richard Wright on Neutrality
βI 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.β
What Richard Wright Said About Others
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Richard Wright on Gertrude Stein 2 quotes
βAs I read it, my ears opened up for the first time in my life and I began to hear Negroes... Above all, I began to hear for the first time the pure, deep dialect of my grandmother. And from that moment on, in all my attempts at writing I was able to tap that vast reservoir of living speech that went on about me.β
About Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright (4 September 1908 β 28 November 1960) was an American novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction.