Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home." Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn't too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, and didn't know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold.

But, don't care how firm your determination is, you can't keep turning round in one place like a horse grinding sugar cane.

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.

One mornin' soon, now, de angel wid de sword is gointuh stop by here.

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

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.

mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. She

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.

But the whole town got vain over it

what we have witnessed since is clearly a marvelous instance of the return of the repressed.

For Zora Neale Hurston has been "rediscovered" in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition:

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.

Ah'm hard of understandin' at times.

De first street lamp in uh colored town. Lift yo' eyes and gaze on it. And when Ah touch de match tuh dat lamp-wick let de light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman's voice.

He had a bow-down command in his face, and every step he took made the thing more tangible.

Then he took off with ponderous flight and circled and lowered, circled and lowered until the others danced in joy and hunger at his approach.

More people have read Hurston's works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel

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.

It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with.

Using "the spy-glass of Anthropology," her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that "both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.

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