Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

Zora Neale Hurston
Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self. Do, you'll be dying befo' yo' time is out.

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

Zora Neale Hurston
Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.

Zora Neale Hurston
Belief in magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.

Zora Neale Hurston
All her life, my daughter's been going around looking for a throne to sit on.

Zora Neale Hurston
She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

Zora Neale Hurston
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

Zora Neale Hurston
It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing—nothing.

Zora Neale Hurston
When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism.

Zora Neale Hurston
If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?

Zora Neale Hurston
So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.

Zora Neale Hurston
I do not pretend to read God's mind. If He has a plan for the universe worked out to the smallest detail, it would be folly for me to presume to get down on my knees and attempt to revise it.

Zora Neale Hurston
Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Zora Neale Hurston
I did not just fall in love, I made a parachute jump.

Zora Neale Hurston
The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.

Zora Neale Hurston
Ah's satisfied wid you jes' lak you is, baby. God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble. Youse a pritty man, and if Ah knowed any way to make you mo' pritty still Ah'd take and do it.

Zora Neale Hurston
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Zora Neale Hurston
You who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kindly of those who walk in the dust. And you who walk in humble places, think kindly too, of others. There has been no proof in the world so far that you would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands.

Zora Neale Hurston
Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!

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

Zora Neale Hurston
Now me, Ah wouldn't let you fix me no breakfus'. Ah git up and fix mah own and den, whut make it so cool, Ah'd fix you some and set it on de back of de cook-stove so you could git it when you wake up.

Zora Neale Hurston
I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.

Zora Neale Hurston
Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.

Zora Neale Hurston
The very best place to be in all the world is St. Mary's parish, Jamaica. And the best spot in St. Mary's is Port Maria, though all of St. Mary's is fine. Old Maker put himself to a lot of trouble to make that part of the island of Jamaica, for everything there is perfect.

Zora Neale Hurston
She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.

Zora Neale Hurston
Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.

Zora Neale Hurston
Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

Zora Neale Hurston
I am the kind of a woman that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added attraction.

Zora Neale Hurston
If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.

Zora Neale Hurston