Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

52. “Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

53. “Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

54. “If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

55. “Don’t you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it’s in the sea, and it’s homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

56. “You’se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

57. “Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

58. “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

59. “Gods always behave like the people who make them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

60. “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

62. “The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

63. “It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

64. “You heard me. You ain’t blind.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

65. “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

66. “I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

67. “But stillness was the sleep of swords.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

68. “That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

69. “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

70. “It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

71. “Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

72. “And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

74. “It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

75. “Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

76. “If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

77. “She went on in her overalls. She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

78. “To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

79. “It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

80. “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

81. “Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

82. “Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

83. “Every tub sits on its bottom.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

84. “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. 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

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

86. “The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

87. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

88. “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

89. “Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

90. “Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

91. “The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

92. “Naw, Ah ain’t no young gal no mo’ but den Ah ain’t no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah’m uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s uh whole lot more’n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

93. “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

94. “Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. It had been a long time since she had remembered. Perhaps she’d better go look. She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

95. “Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

96. “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

97. “I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

98. “She was a wind on the ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

99. “God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

100. “Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living.”

— Zora Neale Hurston