Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

Zora Neale Hurston
The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.

Zora Neale Hurston
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 a sword in my hands.

Zora Neale Hurston
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

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
"Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now." "Yes indeed. You know if you pass some people and don't speak tuh suit 'em dey got tuh go way back in yo' life and see whut you ever done. They know mo' 'bout yuh than you do yo' self. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened." "If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em than Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass."

Zora Neale Hurston
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

Zora Neale Hurston
Tain't nothin' Ah hate lak gittin' sin throwed in mah face dat done got cold.

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

Zora Neale Hurston
The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.

Zora Neale Hurston
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.

Zora Neale Hurston
Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.

Zora Neale Hurston
You are right to listen to proverbs. They are short sayings made out of long experience.

Zora Neale Hurston
It was like sewing ruffles on a fence of nails. The will to make life beautiful was so strong.

Zora Neale Hurston
I was a Southerner and had the map of Dixie on my tongue.

Zora Neale Hurston
She [Ethel Waters] is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire — the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice.

Zora Neale Hurston
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

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

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
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
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