Top 100 Zora's Quotes
#1. This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Alice Walker
#2. I god, Ah can't see what uh woman uh yo' stability would want tuh be treasurin' all dat gum-grease from folks dat don't even own de house dey sleep in. 'Tain't no earthly use. They's jus' some puny humans playin' round de toes uh Time.
Zora Neale Hurston
#4. Dis love! Dat's just whut's got us uh pullin' and haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night. Nanny to Janie
Zora Neale Hurston
#8. Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.
Zora Neale Hurston
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
Zora Neale Hurston
#14. 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
#15. Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
Claudia Rankine
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.
Zora Neale Hurston
#19. 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
#22. 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
#26. You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.
Zora Neale Hurston
#27. In the cool afternoon the fiend from hell specifically sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear. Doubt.
Zora Neale Hurston
#28. 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
#29. They's mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment," Tea Cake observed to the man working next to him. "Look lak dey think God don't know nothin' 'bout de Jim Crow law.
Zora Neale Hurston
#30. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
Zora Neale Hurston
#31. It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.
Zora Neale Hurston
#32. - You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.
Zadie Smith
#34. 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.
Zora Neale Hurston
#35. She sent her face to Joe's funeral, and herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.
Zora Neale Hurston
#36. 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
#37. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.
Zora Neale Hurston
#38. 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
#39. For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.
Zora Neale Hurston
#40. You'se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.
Zora Neale Hurston
#41. she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice
Zora Neale Hurston
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I've been to sorrow's kitchen and licked all of the pots.
Zora Neale Hurston
Sherri Rosen
#45. I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.
Zora Neale Hurston
#46. 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
#47. Now, Pheoby, don't feel too mean wid de rest of 'em 'cause dey's parched up from not knowin' things.
Zora Neale Hurston
#48. Ah'm uh man even if Ah is de Mayor. But de mayor's wife is somethin' different again.
Zora Neale Hurston
#49. It's bad bein' strange niggers wid white folks. Everybody is aginst yuh." "Dat sho is de truth. De ones de white man know is nice colored folks. De ones he don't know is bad niggers.
Zora Neale Hurston
#50. 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
#51. To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.
Zora Neale Hurston
#53. 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
#55. I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.
Zora Neale Hurston
#58. 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
#59. Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing, she was told over and again.
Zora Neale Hurston
#60. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.
Zora Neale Hurston
#61. Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
Zora Neale Hurston
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.
Zora Neale Hurston
#66. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.
Zora Neale Hurston
#67. 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
#68. Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
Zora Neale Hurston
#70. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
Zora Neale Hurston
#72. 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
#73. Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes.
Zora Neale Hurston
#74. 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
#78. 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
#80. There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.
Zora Neale Hurston
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
Zora Neale Hurston
#86. 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
#87. She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.
Zora Neale Hurston
#88. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.
Zora Neale Hurston
#90. 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
#94. 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
#95. She was a wind on the ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port.
Zora Neale Hurston
#96. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.
Zora Neale Hurston
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