# Quote — Richard Wright, Black Boy

> (After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure

- Author: [Richard Wright](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright.md)
- Book: [Black Boy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright/black-boy.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Wright#Black_Boy_(1945)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright/black-boy/after-i-had

## More from this book

> I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright/black-boy/i-paced-the.md)

> This presentation had lasted for more than three hours, but it had enthroned a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present, a sense of man on earth. With the exception of the church and its myths and legends, there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist party.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright/black-boy/this-presentation-had.md)

> (If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-wright/black-boy/if-i-were.md)