Quotes About Resilience

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with sorting and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses

They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

As soon as Tea Cake went out pushing wind in front of him, he saw that the wind and water had given life to lots of things that folks think of as dead and given death to so much that had been living things. Water everywhere. Stray fish swimming in the yard. Three

A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.

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

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes. This

They fought and somehow he managed to bite Tea Cake high up on his cheek-bone once.

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

Jes' 'cause women folks ain't got no big muscled arm and fistes like jugs, folks claim they's weak vessels, but dass uh lie. Dat piece uh red flannel she got hung 'tween her jaws is equal tuh all the fistes God ever made and man ever seen.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. Zora Neale Hurston

The devouring force of the future leered at him at unexpected moments. Then too his daily self seemed to be wearing thin, and the past seeped thru and mastered him for increasingly longer periods.

Ah wouldn't give uh bitch uh bone if she treed uh terrapin.

Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die, Sister Berry snapped.

Ah'm uh bitch's baby round lady people.

Ah had too many feelin's tuh tell which one tuh follow so Ah didn't cry and Ah didn't do nothin' else. But then she kept on astin me how come mah baby look white. She asted me dat maybe twenty-five or thirty times, lak she got tuh sayin' dat and couldn't help herself. So Ah told her, 'Ah don't know nothin' but what Ah'm told tuh do, 'cause Ah ain't nothin' but uh nigger and uh slave.

Le vent revint en triple furie, et une bonne fois pour toutes éteignit les lanternes. Ils restèrent assis en compagnie de tant d'autres comme eux dans d'autres baraquements, leurs yeux s'éreintant contre les murs rudimentaires, leur âme cherchant à savoir si Son intention était de mesurer leur piètre puissance à l'aune de la Sienne. Tous semblaient fixer l'obscur, mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu.

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me.

Once upon uh time, Ah never 'spected nothin', Tea Cake, but bein' dead from the standin' still and tryin' tuh augh. But you came 'long and made somethin' outa me.

I began to worry a bit. Ella kept on hurling slurs. So I said, Come on, Big Sweet, we got to go to home. Nope, Ah ain't got to do nothin' but die and stay black.

I think I was quite abnormal, in that it took me all of a day to get over the fact that I had MS.

I don't think fear can be abolished.

I was up above it. Now, I'm down in it.