Top 30 Most Inspirational Richard Wright Quotes

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Richard Wright was an African-American author, poet, and essayist of the 20th century. He is most famous for his most famous novel, Native Son. He is considered one of the first major African-American authors and has had a huge influence on black American literature.

He was born in 1908 in Natchez, Mississippi. His father was an alcoholic sharecropper, and the family moved North to escape racial violence. After being convicted for armed robbery at age 18, he spent 7 years in prison before publishing his first story. After he published Native Son, he became well known as a protest writer. Still, later in life, he turned to novels that focused on moral complexity and individual responsibility for one’s destiny.

Check out this collection of his most inspirational and thought-provoking quotes to help you be the best person you can be.

30 Most Inspirational Richard Wright Quotes

1. “I just work. I’m black. I work and I don’t bother nobody.” ― Richard Wright

2. “If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.” ― Richard Wright

3. “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.” ― Richard Wright

4. “My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling.” ― Richard Wright

5. “One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet.” ― Richard Wright

6. “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.” ― Richard Wright

7. “Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.” ― Richard Wright

8. “Alone, they said, a man was weak; united with others, he was strong.” ― Richard Wright

9. “How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?” ― Richard Wright

10. “Violence 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.” ― Richard Wright

11. “If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.” ― Richard Wright

12. “Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…” ― Richard Wright

13. “I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.” ― Richard Wright

14. “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.” ― Richard Wright

15. “I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.” ― Richard Wright

16. “The world of most men is given to them by their culture..” ― Richard Wright

17. ″I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ‘em.” ― Richard Wright

18. “The day I begged bread from the city officials was the day that showed me I was not alone in my loneliness, society had cast millions of others with me.” ― Richard Wright

19. “To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.” ― Richard Wright

20. “You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man…” ― Richard Wright

21. “I had already begun to sense that my feelings varied too far from those of the people around me for me to blab about what I felt.” ― Richard Wright

22. “We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.” ― Richard Wright

23. “Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.” ― Richard Wright

24. “The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.” ― Richard Wright

25. “I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.” ― Richard Wright

26. “The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. ”

27. “I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon learning as upon getting into another world of people.” ― Richard Wright

28. “Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires” ― Richard Wright

29. “I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had to encounter and fight when I grew up.” ― Richard Wright

30. “A writer who hasn’t written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.” ― Richard Wright

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