Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.

Zora Neale Hurston
Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.

Zora Neale Hurston
I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

Zora Neale Hurston
Want won't kill you half as quick as worry will.

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
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
Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. 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
Decorate a decoration: the feeling is that there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much.

Zora Neale Hurston
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.

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
Fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

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
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
Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

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

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

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
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
Oh to be a pear tree — any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

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
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 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
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'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
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