Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil. It was like a wall of stone and steel. The funeral was going on outside. All things concerning death and burial were said and done. Finish. End. Never-more. Darkness. Deep hole. Dissolution. Eternity. Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

103. “I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

104. “Pheoby’s hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. So she went on thinking back to her young years and explaining them to her friend in soft, easy phrases while all around the house, the night time put on flesh and blackness.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

105. “De girl baby ain’t born and her mama is dead, dat can git me tuh spend our money on her. Ah told yo’ before dat you got de keys tuh de kingdom. You can depend on dat.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

106. “She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

107. “Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”

— Zora Neale Hurston

108. “Then he took off with ponderous flight and circled and lowered, circled and lowered until the others danced in joy and hunger at his approach.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

109. “I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

110. “Bitterness is the coward’s revenge on the world for having been hurt.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

111. “No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

112. “They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

113. “So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

114. “They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment,” Tea Cake observed to the man working next to him. “Look lak dey think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout de Jim Crow law.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

115. “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

116. “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a perfect example of this.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

117. “But 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. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

118. “Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

119. “They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

120. “So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

121. “Women forget all the things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

122. “I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

123. “The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

124. “Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

125. “She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

126. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

127. “There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

128. “Things lak dat got uh whole lot tuh do wid convenience, but it ain’t got nothin’ tuh do wid love.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

129. “Ah betcha you wants some dressed up dude dat got to look at de sole of his shoe everytime he cross de street tuh see whether he got enough leather dere tuh make it across.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

130. “Why, Tea Cake? Whut good do combin’ mah hair do you? It’s mah comfortable, not yourn.” “It’s mine too. Ah ain’t been sleepin’ so good for more’n uh week cause Ah been wishin’ so bad tuh git mah hands in yo’ hair. It’s so pretty. It feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to mah face.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

131. “If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout ’em then Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

132. “They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

133. “He cut nine hairs out of the mole on her head for luck and went off happy.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

134. “She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

135. “Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

136. “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

137. “If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

138. “If they wants to see and know, why they don’t come kiss and be kissed? Ah could then sit down and tell ’em things. Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

139. “Maybe he ain’t nothin’, she cautioned herself, but he is something in my mouth. He’s got tuh be else Ah ain’t got nothin’ tuh live for. Ah’ll lie and say he is. If Ah don’t, life won’t be nothin’ but uh store and uh house.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

140. “Where is de house where de mouse is de leader?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

141. “Once upon uh time, Ah never ’spected nothin’, Tea Cake, but bein’ dead from the standin’ still and tryin’ tuh laugh. But you come ’long and made somethin’ outa me. So Ah’m thankful fuh anything we come through together.” “Thanky, Ma’am.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

142. “It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

143. “Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

144. “She left the porch pelting her back with unasked questions. They hoped the answers were cruel and strange.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

145. “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”

— Zora Neale Hurston

146. “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

147. “Mystery is the essence of divinity.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

148. “When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

150. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston