# Quote — Richard Wright, Black Boy

> “That’s all right,” he said. “But when you’re through reading those books, I want you to tell me what you get out of them.” That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this?

- 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/thats-all-right

## 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)