“I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her in amazement. It was on reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all human beings were not mean and driving, were not bigots like the members of my family.”Richard Wright book Black BoyBlack Boy (1945)
“He came like a sledgehammer, like a giant out of the mountain with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer…”Richard Wright Historian John Henrik Clarke
“Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.”Richard Wright book Black BoyBlack Boy (1945)