Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

352. “There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

353. “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

354. “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

355. “I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in “the crowded street of life.” That in itself need not be dangerous unless you have the open razors of personal vanity in your pants pocket. The passers-by don’t hurt you, but if you go around like that, they make you hurt yourself.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

356. “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

357. “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

358. “The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

359. “The Estate of Zora Neale Hurston would like to thank those people who have worked so hard over the years in introducing new generations of readers to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. We are indebted to Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and all the Modern Language Association folks who helped usher in Zora’s rediscovery.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

360. “The Fon of Dahomey was foremost among those African peoples who resisted the suppression. Not only was the internal enslavement of their prisoners perceived as essential to their traditions and customs, the external sell of their prisoners afforded their kingdom wealth and political dominance. To maintain a sufficient “slave supply,” the king of Dahomey instigated wars and led raids with.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

361. “The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

362. “Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

363. “It’s bad to have some power, but not enough.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

364. “It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

365. “She knew because she looked.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

366. “And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

367. “Well all right then. Since you own up you ain’t smart enough tuh find out whut Ah’m talkin’ ’bout, Ah’ll tell you. Whut is it dat keeps uh man from gettin’ burnt on uh red-hot stove – caution or nature?” “Shucks! Ah thought you had somethin’ hard tuh ast me. Walter kin tell yuh dat.” “If de conversation is too deep for yuh, how come yuh don’t tell me so, and hush up?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

368. “There two things everybody had to do: Go to God and find out what living is for yourself.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

369. “We sat up in the trees and disputed about what the end of the world would be like when we got there – whether it was sort of tucked under like the hem of a dress, or just was a sharp drop off into nothingness.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

370. “Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the west. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. what need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

371. “I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

372. “Hurrying, dragging, falling, crying, calling out names hopefully and hopelessly.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

373. “Not every skunk in the world rates a first-class killing. Hanging is too good for some folks. They just need their behinds kicked.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

374. “I dreamt of traversing the globe in fancy boots, only to discover I was a mouse on a treadmill.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

375. “Love, I find, is like singing.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

376. “I am the kind of a woman that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added attraction.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

377. “So I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I have been given a mind and will power for that very purpose.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

378. “Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

379. “The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

380. “It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston’s own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

381. “The present was too urgent to let the past intrude.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

382. “Joe was not there waiting for her, the change.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

383. “When you hungry it is painful but when de belly too full it painful too.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

384. “He had given Israel back the notes to songs. The words would be according to their own dreams, but they would sing. They had songs and singers. They might not be absolutely free inside, but anyway he had taken from them the sorrow of serving without will, and had given them the strife of freedom. He had called to their memories the forgotten words of love and family. They had the blessing of being responsible for their own.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

385. “That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

386. “How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually “disappear” from her readership for three full decades?”

— Zora Neale Hurston

387. “De object wuz tuh git dere. So Ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

388. “It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

389. “Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

390. “But the whole town got vain over it.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

391. “He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

392. “Ah’m hard of understandin’ at times.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

393. “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. 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

394. “I been through living for years. I just ain’t dead yet.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

395. “SISTER TAYLOR Brother Mayor, I ain’t one of these folks dat bite my tongue and bust my gall – Whuts inside got to come out!”

— Zora Neale Hurston

396. “While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of Jonah’s Gourd Vine came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of attempting a book seemed so big that I gazed at it in the quiet of the night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

397. “It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

398. “He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we’re the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put ’em on. He aims to keep us down so he’ll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

399. “The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their distances from men.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

400. “Papa used to shake his head at this and say, “What’s de use of me taking my fist to a poor weakly thing like a woman? Anyhow, you got to submit yourself to ’em, so there ain’t no use in beating on ’em and then have to go back and beg ’em pardon.”

— Zora Neale Hurston