Zora Neale Hurston quotes - page 2

It was the meanest moment of eternity. (Zora Neale Hurston)
He looked like the love thoughts of women.
Zora Neale Hurston
Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.
Zora Neale Hurston
She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
Zora Neale Hurston
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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 that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. 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.
Zora Neale Hurston
Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! (Zora Neale Hurston)
If you are silent about the pain they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.
Zora Neale Hurston
Pheoby, yuh got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. 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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
In the cool afternoon the fiend from hell specifically sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear. Doubt.
Zora Neale Hurston
She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.
Zora Neale Hurston
I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.
Zora Neale Hurston
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. (Zora Neale Hurston)
They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
... she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see...
Zora Neale Hurston
Love, I find, is like singing.
Zora Neale Hurston