Top 100 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes
#1. When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west
that cloud field of the sky
to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.
Zora Neale Hurston
#2. Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes.
Zora Neale Hurston
#5. Please God, please suh, don't let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah'm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin', Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time.
Zora Neale Hurston
#6. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.
Zora Neale Hurston
#8. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.
Zora Neale Hurston
#9. Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing, she was told over and again.
Zora Neale Hurston
#10. The morning road air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on,
Zora Neale Hurston
#12. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her.
Zora Neale Hurston
#13. The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
#15. She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.
Zora Neale Hurston
#16. If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?
Zora Neale Hurston
#17. Why, Tea Cake? Whut good do combin' mah hair do you? It's mah comfortable, not yourn." "It's mine too. Ah ain't been sleepin' so good for more'n uh week cause Ah been wishin' so bad tuh git mah hands in yo' hair. It's so pretty. It feels jus' lak underneath uh dove's wing next to mah face.
Zora Neale Hurston
#21. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.
Zora Neale Hurston
#23. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
Zora Neale Hurston
#24. But I ain't puttin' it in de street. Ah'm tellin' you.'
'Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don't pee-pee.
Zora Neale Hurston
#26. Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
Zora Neale Hurston
#28. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.
Zora Neale Hurston
#31. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.
Zora Neale Hurston
#32. Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought, for then it wouldn't seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn't be lonely anymore.
Zora Neale Hurston
#33. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
Zora Neale Hurston
#34. Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
Zora Neale Hurston
#36. It must be recess in (heaven) if St. Peter is lettin his angels out.
Zora Neale Hurston
#38. ignorant editors and a smothering patron - produced the sort of dependence that affects,
Zora Neale Hurston
#39. I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
Zora Neale Hurston
#41. 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.
Zora Neale Hurston
#42. If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.
Zora Neale Hurston
#43. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.
Zora Neale Hurston
#44. Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide.
Zora Neale Hurston
#46. She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.
Zora Neale Hurston
#47. The room inside looked like the mouth of an alligator - gaped wide open to swallow something down.
Zora Neale Hurston
#49. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.
Zora Neale Hurston
#50. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired.
Zora Neale Hurston
#51. Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in 'im.
Zora Neale Hurston
#52. That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.
Zora Neale Hurston
#54. Some of dese mornin's and it won't be long, you gointuh wake up callin' me and Ah'll be gone.
Zora Neale Hurston
#55. Everybody has some special road of thought along which they travel when they are alone to themselves. And his road of thought is what makes every man what he is.
Zora Neale Hurston
#56. When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.
Zora Neale Hurston
#58. Things lak dat got uh whole lot tuh do wid convenience, but it ain't got nothin' tuh do wid love.
Zora Neale Hurston
#59. When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
Zora Neale Hurston
#60. Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.
Zora Neale Hurston
#61. John will never forsake the weak and the helpless, nor fail to bring hope to the hopeless. That is what they believe, and so they do not worry. They go on and laugh and sing. Things are bound to come out right tomorrow. That is the secret of Negro song and laughter.
Zora Neale Hurston
#62. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and cows. I god, they sho don't think none theirselves ... When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don't understand one.
Zora Neale Hurston
#63. It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that.
Zora Neale Hurston
#64. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Most humans didn't love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn't overcome it all the time.
Zora Neale Hurston
#65. Just g'wan back home and set down on yo' royal diasticutis and say nothin'.
Zora Neale Hurston
#66. He ain't kissin' yo' mouf when he carry on over yuh lak dat. He's kissin' yo' foot and 'tain't in uh man tuh kiss foot long. Mouf kissin' is on uh equal and dat's natural but when dey got to bow down tuh love, dey soon straightens up.
Zora Neale Hurston
#68. Hurrying, dragging, falling, crying, calling out names hopefully and hopelessly.
Zora Neale Hurston
#69. Naw, it's real. Ah couldn't stand it if he wuz tuh quit me. Don't know whut Ah'd do. He kin take most any lil thing and make summertime out of it when times is dull. Then we lives offa dat happiness he made till some mo' happiness come along.
Zora Neale Hurston
#71. Any time you catch folks lying, they are scared of something. Lying is dodging. People with guts don't lie. They tell the truth and then if they have to, they fight it out. You lay yourself open by lying..Nothing can lick you if you never get scared.
Zora Neale Hurston
#72. Don't say you'se ole. You'se uh lil girl baby all de time. God made it so you spent yo' ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo' young girl days to spend wid me.
Zora Neale Hurston
#73. Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
Zora Neale Hurston
#74. they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction.
Zora Neale Hurston
#75. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world.
Zora Neale Hurston
#76. Us colored folks is too envious of one 'nother. Dat's how come us don't git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin' us down! Shucks! He don't have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.
Zora Neale Hurston
#77. Ah betcha you wants some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across.
Zora Neale Hurston
#78. For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?
Zora Neale Hurston
#79. I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
Zora Neale Hurston
#81. Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
Zora Neale Hurston
#82. Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.
Zora Neale Hurston
#83. The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.
Zora Neale Hurston
#84. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.
Zora Neale Hurston
#85. Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.
Zora Neale Hurston
#86. He did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon.
Zora Neale Hurston
#87. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
Zora Neale Hurston
#89. The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair
Zora Neale Hurston
#91. She sent her face to Joe's funeral, and herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.
Zora Neale Hurston
#92. I would like just a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I would like that a lot.
Zora Neale Hurston
#93. I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find ... I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.
Zora Neale Hurston
#94. Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
#95. Look lak we done run our conversation from grass roots tuh pine trees.
Zora Neale Hurston
#96. I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal.
Zora Neale Hurston
#98. So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.
Zora Neale Hurston
#99. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.
Zora Neale Hurston
#100. If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.
Zora Neale Hurston
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