Richard Wright
Richard Wright
Influential African-American author of Black Boy, Native Son, and Uncle Tom's Children. His work helped improve race relations in the 20th century.
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 September 1908
CityRoxie, MS
CountryUnited States of America
color skins target
But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
loyalty devotion love-grows
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
reading dope drug
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
leaving might forget
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
house mind half
Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
book support alive
It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
night elbows wake-up
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
heart men civilization
Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?
together-again cry reason
there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed
literature protest
All literature is protest.
heart night light
In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.
blood long suffering
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.
world sake environment
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.
rain wind leaving
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to 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 suns and, perhaps, to bloom