Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin’ in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

202. “What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

203. “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

204. “The woman took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away from remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

205. “Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

206. “My name, is not Cudjo Lewis. It Kossula.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

207. “Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

208. “Well, if yo’ mind is already made up, ’tain’t nothin’ nobody kin do. But you’se takin’ uh awful chance.” “No mo’ than Ah took befo’ and no mo’ than anybody else takes when dey gits married. It always changes folks, and sometimes it brings out dirt and meanness dat even de person didn’t know they had in ’em theyselves.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

209. “And I can’t die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

210. “Everybody has some special road of thought along which they travel when they are alone to themselves. And his road of thought is what makes every man what he is.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

211. “I regret all of my books.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

212. “It was the meanest moment of eternity.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

213. “It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

214. “You are alive aren’t you? Well, so long as you have no grave you are covered by the sky. No limit to your possibilities. The distance to heaven is the same everywhere.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

215. “Tea Cake went out and wandered around. Saw the hand of horror on everything.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

216. “Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

217. “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. 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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

218. “Naw, it’s real. Ah couldn’t stand it if he wuz tuh quit me. Don’t know whut Ah’d do. He kin take most any lil thing and make summertime out of it when times is dull. Then we lives offa dat happiness he made till some mo’ happiness come along.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

219. “Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

220. “Her voice began snagging on the prongs of her feelings.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

221. “The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

222. “The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn’t have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

223. “Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

224. “Tea Cake went out and wandered around. Saw the hand of horror on everything. Houses without roofs, and roofs without houses. Steel and stone all crushed and crumbled like wood. The mother of malice had trifled with men.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

225. “Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

226. “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied with mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

227. “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ bout you just what they hope done happened.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

228. “Sorrow dogged by sorrow is in mah heart.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

229. “The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

230. “All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the “black ivory,” the “coin of Africa,” had no market value. Africa’s ambassadors to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no recorded thought.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

231. “She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

232. “Six eyes were questioning God.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

233. “Something fell off the shelf inside her.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

234. “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

235. “Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

236. “He done taught me de maiden language all over.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

237. “The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

238. “When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

239. “Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. 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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

240. “Through this publication, Barracoon extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor, Barracoon speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

241. “That was the rock she was battered against.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

242. “As Hurston herself noted, “Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

243. “One mornin’ soon, now, de angel wid de sword is gointuh stop by here.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

244. “He has only heard what I felt.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

245. “Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

246. “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

247. “The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

248. “She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

249. “He looked like the love thoughts of women.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

250. “Please God, please suh, don’t let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah’m is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin’, Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time.”

— Zora Neale Hurston