Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

46 Sourced Quotes

View all Zora Neale Hurston Quotes
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day?

Zora Neale Hurston
She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see...

Zora Neale Hurston
Tain't no use in you cryin'... But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die.

Zora Neale Hurston
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Zora Neale Hurston
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.

Zora Neale Hurston
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

Zora Neale Hurston
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
From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom…It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.

Zora Neale Hurston