Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

The woman took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away from remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

You see de rattlesnake in de woods?' Dey say, 'Yeah.' I say 'If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him?' (Oluale Kossula) ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

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

Jump at the sun. You might not land on the sun, but at least you'll get off the ground. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans ... So when the bread didn't rise, and the fish wasn't quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

SISTER TAYLOR Brother Mayor, I ain't one of these folks dat bite my tongue and bust my gall - Whuts inside got to come out! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Every tub sits on its bottom. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I dreamt of traversing the globe in fancy boots, only to discover I was a mouse on a treadmill. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Moon's too pretty fuh anybody tuh be sleepin' it away. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Gods always love the people who make em. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I have a strong suspicion . that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I do not pray ... I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men ... Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell. Been set for still bait. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Well all right then. Since you own up you ain't smart enough tuh find out whut Ah'm talkin' 'bout, Ah'll tell you. Whut is it dat keeps uh man from gettin' burnt on uh red-hot stove - caution or nature?" "Shucks! Ah thought you had somethin' hard tuh ast me. Walter kin tell yuh dat." "If de conversation is too deep for yuh, how come yuh don't tell me so, and hush up? ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

You got de keys to de kingdom. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

She sent her face to Joe's funeral, and herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

So Janie began to think of Death. Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. She was liable to find a feather from his wings lying in her yard any day now. She was sad and afraid too. Poor Jody! He ought not to have to wrassle in there by himself. She sent Sam in to suggest a visit, but Jody said No. These medical doctors wuz all right with the Godly sick, but they didn't know a thing about a case like his. He'd be all right just as soon as the two-headed man found what had been buried against him. He wasn't going to die at all. That was what he thought. But Sam told her different, so she knew. And then if he hadn't the next morning she was bound to know, for people began to gather in the big yard under the palm and china-berry trees. People who would not have dared to foot the place before crept in and did not come to the house. Just squatted under the trees and waited. Rumor, that wingless bird, had shadowed over the town. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

It must be recess in (heaven) if St. Peter is lettin his angels out. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Lot's wife lookee back and turn to a pillar of salt and she be dere till Judgment Day. Poor Cudjo, I no lookee back. I pressee forward. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

We Afficans try raise our chillun right. When dey say we ign'nant we go together and build de school house. Den de county send us a teacher. We Afficky men doan wait lak de other colored people till de white folks gittee ready to build us a school. We build one for ourself den astee de county to send us de teacher. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him.

So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me.how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever find out you don't know half as much 'bout us as you think yo do. It's so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

And twelve more white men had stopped whatever they were doing to listen and pass on what happened between Janie and Tea Cake Woods, and as to whether things were done right or not. That was funny too. Twelve strange men who didn't know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her were going to sit on the thing. Eight or ten white women had come to look at her too. They wore good clothes and had the pinky color that comes of good food. They were nobody's poor white folks. What need had they to leave their richness to come look on Janie in her overalls? ~ Zora Neale Hurston

On the whole I feel like a brown paper bag. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I was born in a Negro town. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

But nothin' can stop you from wishin'. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Six eyes were questioning God. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Cudjo meetee de people at de gate and tells dem, "You see de rattlesnake in de woods?" Dey say, "Yeah." I say "If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him? Same way wid my boys, you unnerstand me. If you leave my boys alone, dey not bother nobody! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

Jeff Bruce threw in. Speakin' of winds, he's de wind and ~ Zora Neale Hurston

It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine
hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

That was the rock she was battered against. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Gods always behave like the people who make them. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

He cut nine hairs out of the mole on her head for luck and went off happy ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Mystery is the essence of divinity ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into
black traditions. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

God was grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning thru his fingers. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn't have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

After all the imagination is a beautiful thing. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Things like that gave me the first glimmering of the universal female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother's side. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Thankee Jesus! Someone come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee someobody who I is, so maybe dey go in the Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody say, 'Yeah, I know Kossula. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? ... The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison ... If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Death had found them watching, trying to see beyond seeing. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

De wife she de eyes to de man's soul. How kin I see now, when I ain' gottee de eyes no mo'? ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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

Tain't no trouble tuh say whut's already so. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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