Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talkin to he rin rhymes.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh laugh. But you come 'long and made somethin' outa me. So Ah'm thankful fuh anything we come through together." "Thanky, Ma'am.

There's two things everybody got to find out for theyselves; they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

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!

You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.

Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief.

Common danger made common friends.

It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.

Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all.

Aw, git reconciled!.. You can't git her wid no fish sandwich.

Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'm a cracked plate.

A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it.

He has only heard what I felt.

Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

Mouths don't empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing.

She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods--come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.

They's mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment," Tea Cake observed to the man working next to him. "Look lak dey think God don't know nothin' 'bout de Jim Crow law.

You got de keys to de kingdom.

He done taught me de maiden language all over.