Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

She knew things that nobody had ever told her... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pastor of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one every sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside yo. —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On the Road (NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.

It was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it got pitiful if you thought about it awhile.

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

one finds great comfort in good dinners

If you're silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.

Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me.how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever find out you don't know half as much 'bout us as you think yo do. It's so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens.

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.

you got tuh go there tuh know there.

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

So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

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.

Finally, she grew quiet. After that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage; Hours of this; a period of introspection; a space of retrospection; then a mixture of both. Out of this, an awful calm.

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.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin' oversportin' theyselves makin' out they pretty, Ah tell 'em 'Ah want yuh tuh see mah Janie sometime.' You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah, Janie?

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

The varicolored cloud dust that the sun has stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.

Gods always behave like the people who created them.

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.