Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

And listenin' tuh dat kind uh talk is jus' lak openin' yo' mouth and lettin' de moon shine down yo' throat.

brother pastorin' up round Ocala dat

How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don't forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that's the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.

Dat's de reason de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De white man tells de n****r to work and he takes and tells his wife.

All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.

World gone money mad. The pinch of war gone, people must spend. Buy and forget. Spend and solace. Silks for sorrows. Jewels to bring back joy.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skill. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of him mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.

Alice Walker published her important essay ("In Search of Zora Neale Hurston") in Ms. magazine in 1975

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

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.

He's a whirlwind among breezes

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.

Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go.

Maybe he ain't nothin', she cautioned herself, but he is something in my mouth. He's got tuh be else Ah ain't got nothin' tuh live for. Ah'll lie and say he is. If Ah don't, life won't be nothin' but uh store and uh house.

and tell me." "Reckon we better not tell yuh heah at de

SISTER TAYLOR Brother Mayor, I ain't one of these folks dat bite my tongue and bust my gall—Whuts inside got to come out!

There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said "Our beloved Mayor," it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like "God is everywhere.

She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether.

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 [and women].

He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we're the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put 'em on. He aims to keep us down so he'll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.

Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by "the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.

And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.

No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.