Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

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

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
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
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
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
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

Zora Neale Hurston
I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.

Zora Neale Hurston
My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race, or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

Zora Neale Hurston
Just then, Death finished his prowling through the house on his padded feet and entered the room. He bowed to Mama in his way, and she made her manners and left us to act out our ceremonies over unimportant things.

Zora Neale Hurston
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

Zora Neale Hurston
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Zora Neale Hurston
I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.

Zora Neale Hurston
There is no agony like bearing an untold story within you.

Zora Neale Hurston
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

Zora Neale Hurston
I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, 'What if there is no me like my statue?'

Zora Neale Hurston
That is the way with people... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.

Zora Neale Hurston