“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? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“The world of most men is given to them by their culture..”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“You look like an accident going somewhere to happen”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“...to see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one's path; one then looks up and suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the world in a strangeness, and the more one stares blankly at the world, the stranger it looks, the more hideously frightening it seems. There is then born in one a wild, hot wish to project out upon the alien world the world that one is seeking. This wish is a hunger for power, to be in command of one's self.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this elementary truth and gained votes by pretending the contrary”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided himself to go to sleep, but it did no good, for he was hungry for these waking visions that depicted his dilemmas, yet he knew that such brooding did not help; in fact he was wasting his waning strength, for into these unreal dramas he was putting the whole of his ardent being. The long hours dragged on.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
Richard Wright
Born place: in Adams County, Mississippi, The United States
Born date September 4, 1908
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“Dünya kadına, erkeklere dediği gibi 'istersen yaz, umurumda değil' demiyordu. Dünya kaba kaba gülerek, 'yazmak mı' diyordu. 'yazman ne işe yarıyor?'
Entelektüel özgürlük maddi şeylere bağlıdır. Şiir de entelektüel özgürlüğe bağlıdır. Kadınlarsa hep yoksul olmuşlardır, sadece iki yüzyıldır değil, dünya kurulalı beri. Kadınlar Atinalı kölelerin çocukları kadar bile entelektüel özgürlüğe sahip olmadılar. O zaman kadınların şiir yazmak için en ufak bir şansları bile yoktu. İşte bu yüzden paranın ve kendine ait bir odanın önemini vurguladım.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas
“In reality punk people are usually the gentlest, kindest folks you'll ever know. They're like hippies, only they wear way more black.”
― Kate Rockland, quote from Falling Is Like This
“He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Pastures of Heaven
“Hazlit has pointed out I could protect Anna by simply marrying her. Would you and Her Grace receive her?” In a display of tact that would have made the duchess proud and quite honestly impressed Westhaven, the duke leaned over and topped off both tea cups. “I put this question to your mother,” the duke admitted, “as my own judgment, according to my sons, is not necessarily to be trusted. I will tell you what Her Grace said, because I think it is the best answer: We trust you to choose wisely, and if Anna Seaton is your choice, we will be delighted to welcome her into the family. Your mother, after all, was not my father’s choice and no more highly born than your Anna.” “So you would accept her.” “We would, but Gayle?” His father had not referred to him by name since Bart’s death, and Westhaven found he had to look away. “You are a decent fellow,” the duke went on, “too decent, I sometimes think. I know, I know.” He waved a hand. “I am all too willing to cut corners, to take a dodgy course, to use my consequence at any turn, but you are the opposite. You would not shirk a responsibility if God Almighty gave you leave to do so. I am telling you, in the absence of the Almighty’s availability: Do not marry her out of pity or duty or a misguided sense you want a woman in debt to you before you marry her. Marry her because you can’t see the rest of your life without her and you know she feels the same way.” “You are telling me to marry for love,” Westhaven concluded, bemused and touched. “I am, and you will please tell your mother I said so, for I am much in need of her good graces these days, and this will qualify as perhaps the only good advice I’ve ever given you.” “The only good advice?” Westhaven countered. “Wasn’t it you who told me to let Dev pick out my horses for me? You who said Val shouldn’t be allowed to join up to keep an eye on Bart? You who suggested the canal project?” “Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then,” the duke quipped. “Or so my brother Tony reminds me.”
― Grace Burrowes, quote from The Heir
“A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.”
― Lynda Barry, quote from Cruddy
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