# Quote — Richard Wright, Black Boy

> I read Stein’s Three Lives, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Dostoevski’s The Possessed, all of which revealed new realms of feeling. But the most important discoveries came when I veered from fiction proper into the field of psychology and sociology. I ran through volumes that bore upon the causes of my conduct and the conduct of my family. I studied tables of figures relating population density to insanity, relating housing to disease, relating school and recreational opportunities to crime, relating various forms of neurotic behavior to environment, relating racial insecurities to the conflicts between whites and blacks… I still had no friends, casual or intimate, and felt the need for none. I had developed a self-sufficiency that kept me distant from others, emotionally and psychologically.

- 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/i-read-steins

## 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)