Quotes About Zora Neale Hurston

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening.

The dark obscurity into which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision.

they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction.

For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas's student at Barnard became metaphors

Six eyes were questioning God.

It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston's own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.

see, it was nice. The fact that the thought

The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.

This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer's Cane than to Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.

For Zora Neale Hurston has been "rediscovered" in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition:

It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker's depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of "racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.

More people have read Hurston's works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel

The myths she describes so accurately are in fact "alternative modes for perceiving reality," and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.

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.

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

The mediocre have no importance except through appointment. They feel invaded and defeated by the presence of creative folk among them.

Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible.

As author, she functions as "a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law." The myths she describes so accurately are in fact "alternative modes for perceiving reality," and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.

The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.

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

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.