I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
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.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy