Quotes About Expression

Basing his work on F.R. Leavis's (1895–1978) ideas on literary criticism, Hoggart argued that a critical reading of art could reveal "the felt quality of life" of a society. Only art could recreate life in all its rich complexity and diversity.

Her expression suggested the kind of deeply private, strictly incommunicable anguish of someone who has just slammed the car door on her thumb.

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 heard me. You ain't blind.

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

She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside yo. —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On the Road (NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. (NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

At the bottom in the gut of jazz if you listen closely you can hear—no matter how complexly, obliquely, mysteriously stylized—somebody talking, crying, growling, singing, farting, praying, stomping, voicing in all those modes through which our bodies communicate some tale about how it feels to be here on earth or leaving, or about the sweet pain of hanging on between the coming and going.

But I ain't puttin' it in de street. Ah'm tellin' you.' 'Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don't pee-pee.

He done taught me de maiden language all over.

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.

Ah'm hard of understandin' at times.

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

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

That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.

Zora Neale Hurston

she constantly shifts back and forth between her "literate" narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice

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

Why, Tea Cake? Whut good do combin' mah hair do you? It's mah comfortable, not yourn." "It's mine too. Ah ain't been sleepin' so good for more'n uh week cause Ah been wishin' so bad tuh git mah hands in yo' hair. It's so pretty. It feels jus' lak underneath uh dove's wing next to mah face.

Oluale Kossola was not just a repository of black genius, tapped for a few stories, tales, and colorful phrases, and Zora Neale Hurston knew this. She did not perceive Barracoon as another cultural artifact illustrating the theoretical characteristics of Negro expression but as one, singular, portrait of black humanity.

Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

pay no attention to what I say about love, for as I said before, it may not mean a thing. It is my own bathtub singing. Just because my mouth opens up like a prayer book, it does not just have to flap like a Bible.