Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

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

[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience.

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

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.

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.

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

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

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

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.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

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

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

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

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning.

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

I been through living for years. I just ain't dead yet.

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.

You got to go there to know there.

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

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.

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

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

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.

every heart has its graveyard.

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

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

The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

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

If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.

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

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

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

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

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

God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.

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. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody toassociate with me who does not wish me near them?

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.

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.

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.

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.

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.

No man may make another free.

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.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.