Top 217 Quotes & Sayings by Zora Neale Hurston - Page 2

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.

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

truth is a letter from courage!

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

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

I do not pray. . . . I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men. . . . Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility.

Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? . . . The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. . . . If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.

Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

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.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

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

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

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. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

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.

you can't beat me and my prayers!

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

It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.

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

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

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

anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

want won't kill you half as quick as worry will.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

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

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

It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

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.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slaver y is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.

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

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

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.

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.

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.

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

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.

God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.

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

To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.

Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

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.

every heart has its graveyard.

[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience.

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

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.

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

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 something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

I love myself when I am laughing.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me