Quotes About Perspective

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

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

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.

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships…pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her…She had found a jewel inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell.

for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you....

De wife she de eyes to de man's soul. How kin I see now, when I ain' gottee de eyes no mo'?

Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.

Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.

Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.

She must talk to a man who was ten immensities away.

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her.

Hurston writes. "The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on—that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away."24

Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps.

She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.

Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was 'bout y'all turning out so smart after Him makin' yuh different; and 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 you 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.

wasn't ready to think of colored people in

We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones.

she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.

Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide.

I dreamt of traversing the globe in fancy boots, only to discover I was a mouse on a treadmill.