Richard Wright Quotes

129 Sourced Quotes

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

Richard Wright
The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms; it is the history of Western Man writ small. It is the history of men who tried to adjust themselves to a world whose laws, customs, and instruments of force were leveled against them The Negro is America's metaphor.

Richard Wright
We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we black folk perish, America will perish.

Richard Wright
Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Richard Wright
Ah cant see white n Ah cant see black, he said. Ah sees rich men n Ah sees po men.

Richard Wright
Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection.

Richard Wright
What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

Richard Wright
I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me.

Richard Wright
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons. They simply extended into objective reality what was already a subjective reality. Only jailors really believe in jails.

Richard Wright