Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

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.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

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.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

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.

she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see...

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

He looked like the love thoughts of women.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

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.

she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. .. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, Ah hope you fall on soft ground, because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

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.