Zora Neale Hurston quotes:

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

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's beyond me.

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.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

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

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.

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

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

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

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

Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought, for then it wouldn't seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn't be lonely anymore.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

It costs you something to do good!

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.

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

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

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

Gods always love the people who make em.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

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

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.

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.

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

The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood."

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.

How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

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

Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!

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.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I love myself when I am laughing.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field of the sky -- to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

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.

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

He looked like the love thoughts of women.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Dis love! Dat's just whut's got us uh pullin' and haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night. Nanny to Janie

John will never forsake the weak and the helpless, nor fail to bring hope to the hopeless. That is what they believe, and so they do not worry. They go on and laugh and sing. Things are bound to come out right tomorrow. That is the secret of Negro song and laughter.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.

She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West. God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one. Dark people are always "bad" when they do not admit the Divine Plan like that. A certain Javanese man who sticks up for Indonesian Independence is very lowdown by the papers, and suspected of being a Japanese puppet.

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.

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

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

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

...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.

..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

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

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.

Affection makes your spirit slither out from its concealing spot.

Africa has her mouth on Moses.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

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

anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.

But as de old folk always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut Ah'm liable tuh do yet.

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self. Do, you'll be dying befo' yo' time is out.

Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.

every heart has its graveyard.

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

Every tub sits on its bottom.

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.

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

Faith hasn't got no eyes, but she's long-legged.

For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.

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.

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

Gods always love the people who make 'em.

Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole way of life.

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

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.

I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.

I am the kind of a woman that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added attraction.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me