Quotes from Zora Neale Hurston

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.

Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

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

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

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.

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.

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

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life.

Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.

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

...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.

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.

I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

I regret all of my books.

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

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.

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!

Love, I find, is like singing.

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

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.