Zora Neale Hurston - God Quotes

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All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

Zora Neale Hurston
Two things everybody's got to do for themselves. They've got to go to God, and they have got to find out about living for themselves

Zora Neale Hurston
They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

Zora Neale Hurston
Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Zora Neale Hurston
Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering

Zora Neale Hurston
The inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West. God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one. Dark people are always "bad" when they do not admit the Divine Plan like that. A certain Javanese man who sticks up for Indonesian Independence is very lowdown by the papers, and suspected of being a Japanese puppet.

Zora Neale Hurston