Zora neale hurston quotes

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.

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.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

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.

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

want won't kill you half as quick as worry will.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

every heart has its graveyard.

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

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

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.

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.

you can't beat me and my prayers!

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 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 the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. 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.

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

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

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

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.

Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.

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

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

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

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.

He looked like the love thoughts of women.

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

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

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.

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

I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.

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

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.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

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

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

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

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

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.

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

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

It costs you something to do good!

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.

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.

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

anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.

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

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.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

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.

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

I love myself when I am laughing.

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

Such as I am, I am a precious gift.

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

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

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

Love, I find, is like singing.

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

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

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

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.

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

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

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

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

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.

No man may make another free.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

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.

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

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.

You got to go there to know there.

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

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.

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.

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.

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

That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.

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

truth is a letter from courage!

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

Every tub sits on its bottom.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

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.

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.

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

I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal.

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

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

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

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