Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

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.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

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.

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.

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.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

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

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.

To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

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.

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

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.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

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.

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

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

When we sing the blues, we're singin' out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

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.

Gods always love the people who make 'em.

Africa has her mouth on Moses.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.

Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.

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.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

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 something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

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

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

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

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

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

Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slaver y is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.