Zora Neale Hurston citations

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

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Contexte: 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?

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

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

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Contexte: 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.

"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Contexte: 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.

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Variante: 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

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Variante: 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!

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.

Variante: 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

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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

Source: Dust Tracks on a Road

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God