Quotes About Resilience

But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo's wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.

For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?

But, don't care how firm your determination is, you can't keep turning round in one place like a horse grinding sugar cane.

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.

mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. She

De first street lamp in uh colored town. Lift yo' eyes and gaze on it. And when Ah touch de match tuh dat lamp-wick let de light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes....Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

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

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

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

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.

Zora Neale Hurston

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

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

As Hurston herself noted, "Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.

The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

That was the rock she was battered against.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear

The woman took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away from remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.

Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or black is makin' a spit cup outa you: have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'ma cracked plate.

They came in wagons [...] People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

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

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