Zora Neale Hurston Quotations | Page 2

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

It costs you something to do good!

Tain't no use in you cryin' . . . But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die.

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

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

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

The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet… From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.

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.

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

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.

It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

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

You heard me. You ain't blind.

Every tub sits on its bottom.

It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.

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

When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.

The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

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

Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? . . . The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. . . . If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.

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

Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.

There's two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing. And it's different on every shore. And living... well... There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

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.

Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.

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!

I regret all of my books.

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

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

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

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.

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.

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.

Research is formalized curiosity. 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.

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

Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.

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

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

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

No man may make another free.

Love, I find, is like singing.

From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom…It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.

Perhaps it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?' afterward than before. Anyway, the force of 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.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

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.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

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.

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

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

Mystery is the essence of divinity

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.

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

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

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.

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.

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

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

Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.

every heart has its graveyard.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Such as I am, I am a precious gift.

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

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

I love myself when I am laughing.

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

You got to go there to know there.

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.

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

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

It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.

It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.