Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some p...

Then you must tell them that love isn't something like a grindstone that's the same thing everywhere...

...you got tuh go there tuh know there.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they wo...

They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A...

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wond...

Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage. Time came w...

Please God, please suh, don't let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah'm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey ...

Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it m...

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. S...

Love I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves though it may not impr...

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

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

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in a...

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

John will never forsake the weak and the helpless, nor fail to bring hope to the hopeless. That is w...

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

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

No man may make another free.

All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innova...

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

Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and grovelling submission to those you can't. Once having s...

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

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

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

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do ge...

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morn...

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

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard ...

Now, women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't wan...

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happen...

Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie ...

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

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me.how surp...

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from wh...

And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Hav...

They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of thes...

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others ...

Tain't no use in you cryin' . . . But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave t...

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others ...

..she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her br...

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

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

Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded ...

They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tas...

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

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and...

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

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

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You...

He has only heard what I felt.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is j...

No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

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

So I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that ...

I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in "the crowded street of life." That in itself nee...

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be ...

There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other...

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as...

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

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, ...

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

Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a...

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

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

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, ...

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morn...

When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud fiel...

The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. H...

I have been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain...

I love myself when I am laughing.

I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good en...

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

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

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothin...

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