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

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

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