Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

African American folklorist, novelist, short story writer, and Civic Rights advocate (1891–1960)

Zora Neale Hurston (7 January 1891 – 28 January 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

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Alternative Names: Zora N. Hurston

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one finds great comfort in good dinners

Finally, she grew quiet. After that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage; Hours of this; a period of introspection; a space of retrospection; then a mixture of both. Out of this, an awful calm.

The varicolored cloud dust that the sun has stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees.

Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin' oversportin' theyselves makin' out they pretty, Ah tell 'em 'Ah want yuh tuh see mah Janie sometime.' You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah, Janie?

Gods always behave like the people who created them.

Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.

...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.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk

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

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was all there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again.

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

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.

Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human flesh on the block? That was only an outside symbol. Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others. All of the outward signs come out of that.

you can't beat me and my prayers!