Top 400 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Things like that gave me the first glimmering of the universal female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother’s side.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

402. “You cannot avoid hearing drums in Haiti.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

403. “Here it is just like it is in Egypt – the scared people do all of the biggest talk.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

404. “Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman’s voice.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

405. “Lot’s wife lookee back and turn to a pillar of salt and she be dere till Judgment Day. Poor Cudjo, I no lookee back. I pressee forward.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

406. “Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

407. “The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

408. “Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

409. “Charlotte Mason considered herself not only a patron to black writers and artists, but also a guardian of black folklore. She believed it her duty to protect it from those whites who, having “no more interesting things to investigate among themselves,” were grabbing “in every direction material that by right belongs entirely to another race.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

410. “Being under my own roof, and my personality not invaded by others makes a lot of difference in my outlook on life and everything. Oh, to be once more alone in a house!”

— Zora Neale Hurston

411. “Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

412. “Jeff Bruce threw in. “Speakin’ of winds, he’s de wind and.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

413. “I was born in a Negro town.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

414. “Tain’t no trouble tuh say whut’s already so.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

415. “She had been getting ready for her journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

416. “For Zora Neale Hurston has been “rediscovered” in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition:.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

417. “A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

418. “Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

419. “These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

420. “I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, “What is there is no me like my statue?” The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

421. “Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

422. “Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

423. “Most people is thin-brained.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

424. “Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

425. “I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

426. “We Afficans try raise our chillun right. When dey say we ign’nant we go together and build de school house. Den de county send us a teacher. We Afficky men doan wait lak de other colored people till de white folks gittee ready to build us a school. We build one for ourself den astee de county to send us de teacher.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

427. “But nothin’ can stop you from wishin’.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

428. “Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

429. “We proaged on thru the woods that was full of magnolia, pine, cedar, oak, cypress, hickory, and many kinds of trees whose names I do not know. It is hard to know all the trees in Florida.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

430. “Nothing is so desolate as a place where life has been and gone.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

431. “She must lend her ears to the sounds of mighty words boiling out of futile men. She must bear something in male form, for after all that is what she was born for – a passageway for boy children.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

432. “Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

433. “How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don’t forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that’s the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

434. “No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

435. “The American Dream is a major theme in the narrative of racial difference. The shadow side of that dream, which is not talked about, entails the plundering of racial “Others.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

436. “The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

437. “I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

438. “He’s a whirlwind among breezes.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

439. “Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

440. “Whole nations are transported, exterminated, their name to be forgotten, except in the annual festival of their conquerors, when sycophants call the names of the vanquished countries to the remembrance of the victors.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

441. “She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

442. “I fail to see where it would have been more uplifting for them to have been inside a church listening to a man urging them to ‘contemplate the sufferings of our Lord,’ which is just another way of punishing one’s self for nothing. It is very much better for them to climb the rocks in their bare clean feet and meet Him face to face in their search for the eternal in beauty.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

443. “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.”

— Zora Neale Hurston