Top 100 Hurston Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Hurston

#1. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.

#2. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.

Zora Neale Hurston

#3. As Hurston herself noted, "Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.

Zora Neale Hurston

#4. Zora Neale Hurston said fear is the greatest emotion and I said, 'No my dear sister.' Fear will make us move to save our own skins. Love also makes us save ourselves, but it will make us move to save others as well.

Sonia Sanchez

#5. Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

Claudia Rankine

#6. I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

Rachel Kushner

#7. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world.
-Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

#8. There in the fresh young darkness close together. Pheoby eager to feel and do through Janie, but hating to show her zest for fear it might be thought mere curiosity. Janie full of that oldest human longing - self-revelation. - ZORA NEALE HURSTON, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Janet Mock

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#10. I've been to sorrow's kitchen and licked all of the pots.
Zora Neale Hurston

Sherri Rosen

#11. 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

#12. Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Zora Neale Hurston

#13. But stillness was the sleep of swords.

Zora Neale Hurston

#14. 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

#15. Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes.

Zora Neale Hurston

#16. It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

Zora Neale Hurston

#17. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms.

Zora Neale Hurston

#18. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

Zora Neale Hurston

#19. Mystery is the essence of divinity

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#21. 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

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#23. Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh laugh. But you come 'long and made somethin' outa me. So Ah'm thankful fuh anything we come through together." "Thanky, Ma'am.

Zora Neale Hurston

#24. In this chapter, what do you find out about Janie's parents and early childhood? CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1

Zora Neale Hurston

#25. All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

Zora Neale Hurston

#26. Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#28. Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing, she was told over and again.

Zora Neale Hurston

#29. 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

#30. He was a glance from God.

Zora Neale Hurston

#31. No man may make another free.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#33. My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.

Zora Neale Hurston

#34. 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

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#36. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

Zora Neale Hurston

#37. There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Zora Neale Hurston

#38. Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#40. 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

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#42. A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.

Zora Neale Hurston

#43. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

Zora Neale Hurston

#44. Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Zora Neale Hurston

#45. The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.

Zora Neale Hurston

#46. 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.

Zora Neale Hurston

#47. You got me in de go-long.

Zora Neale Hurston

#48. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#50. 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

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#52. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

Zora Neale Hurston

#53. They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged.

Zora Neale Hurston

#54. 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

#55. Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts.

Zora Neale Hurston

#56. There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.

Zora Neale Hurston

#57. Six eyes were questioning God.

Zora Neale Hurston

#58. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

Zora Neale Hurston

#59. Moon's too pretty fuh anybody tuh be sleepin' it away.

Zora Neale Hurston

#60. You'se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#62. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Zora Neale Hurston

#63. Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

Zora Neale Hurston

#64. Silence is all the genius a fool has.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#66. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#68. Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#70. That was the rock she was battered against.

Zora Neale Hurston

#71. De girl baby ain't born and her mama is dead, dat can git me tuh spend our money on her. Ah told yo' before dat you got de keys tuh de kingdom. You can depend on dat.

Zora Neale Hurston

#72. Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.

Zora Neale Hurston

#73. 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.

Zora Neale Hurston

#74. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#77. People can be slave ships in shoes.

Zora Neale Hurston

#78. Tain't no use in you cryin' ... But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die.

Zora Neale Hurston

#79. Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.

Zora Neale Hurston

#80. It's uh known fact ... you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh.

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

#82. It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.

Zora Neale Hurston

#83. Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin' oversportin' theyselves makin' out they pretty, Ah tell 'em 'Ah want yuh tuh see mah Janie sometime.' You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah, Janie?

Zora Neale Hurston

#84. The very best place to be in all the world is St. Mary's parish, Jamaica. And the best spot in St. Mary's is Port Maria, though all of St. Mary's is fine. Old Maker put himself to a lot of trouble to make that part of the island of Jamaica, for everything there is perfect.

Zora Neale Hurston

#85. Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

Zora Neale Hurston

#86. I love myself when I am laughing.

Zora Neale Hurston

#87. ...you got tuh go there tuh know there.

Zora Neale Hurston

#88. I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

Zora Neale Hurston

#89. Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.

Zora Neale Hurston