Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I note that the Africa loves to depict the grace of reptiles.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

302. “To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica’s black mass.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

303. “I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

304. “I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

305. “You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

306. “It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health – a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

307. “Now, Pheoby, don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ’em ’cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

308. “Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

309. “We cry ’cause we slave. In night time we cry, we say we born and raised to be free people and now we slave. We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis. It strange to us. Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say. Some makee de fun at us.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

310. “Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

311. “Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

312. “The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

313. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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

— Zora Neale Hurston

315. “A little seed of fear was growing into a tree.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

316. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

317. “That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

318. “It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

319. “She 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. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

320. “Ah hears what they say ’cause they just will collect round mah porch ’cause it’s on de big road. Mah husband git so sick of ’em sometime he.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

321. “After all the imagination is a beautiful thing.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

322. “Africa has her mouth on Moses.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

323. “Miserable, sullen men, black and white under guard had to keep on searching for bodies and digging graves. A huge ditch was dug across the white cemetery and a big ditch was opened across the black graveyard. Plenty.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

324. “Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

325. “When he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would not consider the two together. They’d look with envy at the things and pity the man that owned them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

326. “For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

327. “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

328. “World gone money mad. The pinch of war gone, people must spend. Buy and forget. Spend and solace. Silks for sorrows. Jewels to bring back joy.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

329. “Thankee Jesus! Someone come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee someobody who I is, so maybe dey go in the Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

330. “It looked so quiet and peaceful around. But the stillness was the sleep of swords.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

331. “I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

332. “To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat. I have no urge to make any concessions like that to the world as yet. I might be like that some day, but I doubt it. I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands, and I don’t intend to run until you run me. So why give off the smell of something dead under the house while I am still in there tussling with my sword in my hand?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

333. “The mediocre have no importance except through appointment. They feel invaded and defeated by the presence of creative folk among them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

334. “You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ’em of they will.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

335. “But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

336. “If it wuzn’t for so many black folks it wouldn’t be no race problem. De white folks would take us in wid dem. De black ones is holdin’ us back.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

337. “Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing,” she was told over and again.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

338. “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

339. “I have a strong suspicion. that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

340. “No man may make another free.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

341. “The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

342. “All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

343. “She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

344. “When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

345. “This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

346. “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. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

347. “Many a man thinks he is making something when he’s only changing things around.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

348. “The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

349. “Oluale Kossola could never fathom why he was in “de Americky soil.” “Dey bring us ’way from our soil and workee us hard de five year and six months.” And once free, he says, “we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan’.”41 And in postbellum America he was subject to the exploitation of his labor and the vagaries of the law, just as he was in antebellum America. He remained confounded by this cruel treatment for the rest of his life.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

350. “The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.”

— Zora Neale Hurston