Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.

Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston's ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.

He's got uh throne in de seat of his pants.

Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.

So den we gittee married by de license, but I doan love my wife no mo' wid de license than I love her befo' de license. She a good woman and I love her all de time. (Oluale Kossula)

That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.

We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk.

That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of "the race problem," an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.

You see de rattlesnake in de woods?' Dey say, 'Yeah.' I say 'If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him?' (Oluale Kossula)

The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world.

These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.

she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice

Rumor, that wingless bird, had shadowed over the town.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.

ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects

the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving.

The icy sword of the square-toed one had cut off his breath and left his hands in a pose of agonizing protest.

They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.

One white reviewer in 1937 [said he] had difficulty believing that such a town as Eatonville, inhabited and governed entirely by negroes, could be real.

Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. It had been a long time since she had remembered. Perhaps she'd better look. She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place.

The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair