Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

Featured in: Science Quotes, Curiosity Quotes

2. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

3. “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

Featured in: Resistance Quotes, Sad Quotes About Life, Silence Quotes

4. “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

5. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

6. “I love myself when I am laughing.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

7. “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

8. “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

9. “Such as I am, I am a precious gift.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

10. “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

11. “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

12. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

13. “Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

Featured in: Book Quotes

14. “Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!”

— Zora Neale Hurston

15. “No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

16. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

17. “A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

18. “She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

19. “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

20. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

21. “Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

22. “I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you’re worth. I sure would make money on the deal.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

23. “She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

24. “I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

25. “Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

26. “Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

27. “The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

28. “Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

29. “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

30. “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

31. “Ah can look through muddy water and see dry land.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

33. “Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

34. “Silence is all the genius a fool has.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

35. “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

36. “It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

37. “Half Gods are worshipped with wine and Flowers. Real Gods require Blood.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

38. “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in ’im.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

39. “I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

40. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

41. “Jump at the sun. You might not land on the sun, but at least you’ll get off the ground.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

42. “Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

43. “She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

44. “Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

45. “I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That’s living.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

46. “People can be slave-ships in shoes.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

47. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

48. “Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’s long-legged.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

49. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Janie had had no chance to know things, so she had to ask. Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day? In.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

50. “You got to go there to know there.”

— Zora Neale Hurston