Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it.
George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright’s own time, William Faulkner.
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.
I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.
There would have to hover above him, like the stars in a full sky, a vast configuration of images and symbols whose magic and power could lift him up and make him live so intensely that the dread of being black and unequal would be forgotten; that even death would not matter, that it would be a victory.
Ovunque, nella mia vita, io abbia incontrato la religione, ho trovato la discordia, il tentativo di un individuo o di un gruppo di dominare un altro in nome di Dio.
If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I’d do it. But I don’t believe anything can stop it.
Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.
If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.
Pale yellow sunshine fell through high windows and slashed the air.
But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.
As the importance of ideology declined, I began to feel that maybe ideology was a weapon that suited only certain hostile conditions of life.
In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.
One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds, when man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.
I thought they was hard and I acted hard.” He paused, then whimpered in confession, “But I ain’t hard, Mr. Max. I ain’t hard even a little bit... ” He rose to his feet. “But... I-I won’t be crying none when they take me to that chair. But I’ll b-b-be feeling inside of me like I was crying... I’ll be feeling and thinking that they didn’t see me and I didn’t see them...
But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing...
I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it.
As though for purposes of renewal, he had for a time gone back into the insensible world out of which life had originally sprung, and, before he could live again, hope or plan again, a regrouping of his faculties into a new personality structure would be necessary.