Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

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
Decorate a decoration: the feeling is that there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much.

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

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
I'll bet when you get down on them rusty knees and get to worrying God, He just goes in His privy-house and slams the door. That's what He thinks about you and your prayers.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

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
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.

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
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
Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

Zora Neale Hurston
Nobody pushed him uphill, but everybody was willing to lend a hand on the downward shove.

Zora Neale Hurston
Silence is all the genius a fool has and it is one of the things a smart man knows how to use when he needs it.

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

Zora Neale Hurston
Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands.

Zora Neale Hurston
Fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
Lord, how some folks can't lie! They don't wait to find out a thing. Some of 'em so expert on minding folks' business that they kin look at de smoke coming out yo' chimbley and tell you what you cooking.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

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

Zora Neale Hurston
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. 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.

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
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.

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
It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

Zora Neale Hurston