Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (74 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Seraph on the Suwanee

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: 74 quotes9 likes

Famous Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.

“Mystery is the essence of divinity”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“If you are silent about the pain they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Tell My Horse (1938), Ch. 15, p. 219

“Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Variant: 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.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes about love

“Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“He looked like the love thoughts of women.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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

“She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Love, I find, is like singing.”

Zora Neale Hurston

“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes about the world

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.”

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Zora Neale Hurston

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Source: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
Context: 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. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 20, p. 193.
Context: Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. 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.

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston: Trending quotes

“I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Source: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.”

Zora Neale Hurston

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Context: 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 is beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held — so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place — who knows?

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

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

Zora Neale Hurston

“I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.”

Zora Neale Hurston

"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Context: I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.

“I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out.”

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Variant: If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.
Source: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 12 : My People! My People!

“Research is formalized curiosity.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
Source: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 10 : Research, p. 143.

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Variant: There is two things everybody got to find out for theirselves. They got to find out about love and they got to find out about living.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Source: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

“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 book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“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

“So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It was the meanest moment of eternity.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“… she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see…”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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 a sword in my hands.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“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

“If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.”

Zora Neale Hurston

“An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”

Zora Neale Hurston

“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun."”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch.2 : My Folks, p. 13.
Context: Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

“You heard me. You ain't blind.”

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

C. 2, p. 10.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 1, p. 9.

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

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 book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.”

Zora Neale Hurston

“My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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 book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“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.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

“anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!”

Zora Neale Hurston

Source: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings

“The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Seraph on the Suwanee

Source: Seraph on the Suwanee

“Pheoby, yuh got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. 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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Context: "Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now.""Yes indeed. You know if you pass some people and don't speak tuh suit 'em dey got tuh go way back in yo' life and see whut you ever done. They know mo' 'bout yuh than you do yo' self. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened.""If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em than Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass."

Janie and Phoeby, Ch. 1, p. 16.

“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 book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“In the cool afternoon the fiend from hell specifically sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear. Doubt.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Common danger made common friends”

Zora Neale Hurston

“Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 14 : Love, p. 203.

“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.”