Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?

She wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

But as de old folk always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut Ah'm liable tuh do yet.

Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.

I was born in a Negro town.

Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in 'im.

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.

Every tub sits on its bottom.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'm a cracked plate.

Hurrying, dragging, falling, crying, calling out names hopefully and hopelessly.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

He's got uh throne in de seat of his pants.

Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair

You won't git far and you won't be long, when dat big gut reach over and grab dat little one,

It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.

Ah done lived Grandma's way, now Ah means tuh live mine.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.

Every heart has its graveyard.

Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now.

Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.

You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.

Things lak dat got uh whole lot tuh do wid convenience, but it ain't got nothin' tuh do wid love.

Joe was not there waiting for her, the change

you can't beat me and my prayers!

Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play.

Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know.

It was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it got pitiful if you thought about it awhile.

Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

He was a glance from God.

Jeff Bruce threw in. Speakin' of winds, he's de wind and

Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering

Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living.

Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.

It seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

I would like just a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I would like that a lot.

Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.

Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

The mediocre have no importance except through appointment. They feel invaded and defeated by the presence of creative folk among them.

These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.

Want won't kill you half as quick as worry will.

I love myself when I am laughing.

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.

She left the porch pelting her back with unasked questions. They hoped the answers were cruel and strange.

I note that the Africa loves to depict the grace of reptiles.

Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.

You got de keys to de kingdom.

That was the rock she was battered against.

Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah'm lyin'. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.

Affection makes your spirit slither out from its concealing spot.

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.

Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.

But stillness was the sleep of swords.

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

You got to go there to know there.

She must talk to a man who was ten immensities away.

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of the heart.

Gods always love the people who make em.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

Tain't no trouble tuh say whut's already so.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

The varicolored cloud dust that the sun has stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees.

When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism.

Aw, git reconciled!.. You can't git her wid no fish sandwich.

I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.

He did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon.

She was a wind on the ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port.

And listenin' tuh dat kind uh talk is jus' lak openin' yo' mouth and lettin' de moon shine down yo' throat.

The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

The icy sword of the square-toed one had cut off his breath and left his hands in a pose of agonizing protest.

Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide.