Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

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

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know.

We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

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

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.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

He looked like the love thoughts of women.

Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.

Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

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.

every heart has its graveyard.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.

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.

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

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.

Magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

Love, I find, is like singing.

you can't beat me and my prayers!

Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self. Do, you'll be dying befo' yo' time is out.

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.

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

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.

...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.

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.

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

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

It was the meanest moment of eternity.