It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It.
It’s because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind.
There are times, Your Honor, when reality bears features of such an impellingly moral complexion that it is impossible to follow the hewn path of expediency. 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.
I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.
He did not like me and I did not like him, though I tried harder than he to conceal my dislike.
His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.
Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality – “the pivot of my life” – was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: “there were literally millions of him everywhere.
If you think I’m telling tall tales, get chummy with some white cop who works in a Black Belt district and ask him for the lowdown. When.
It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.
He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear.
So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true;.
I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.
One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With.
An organic wish to cease to be, to stop living, seized him. Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which. Over and over he had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed.
In shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of life, I did not and could not share their spirit.
George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright’s own time, William Faulkner.
While his mother sank in his eyes into the embodiment of passivity and victimization, he found it almost impossible to forge warm ties with other human beings.
Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are doing down the same drain...
Speaking figuratively, they were soon chronic alcoholics, men who lived by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation. From.
A writer who hasn’t written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.