Quotes About Empowerment

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zora Neale Hurston

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects

As Hurston herself noted, "Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.

She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.

Us colored folks is too envious of one 'nother. Dat's how come us don't git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin' us down! Shucks! He don't have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.

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

The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

You can't beat nobody down so low till you can rob 'em of they will.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear

Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or black is makin' a spit cup outa you: have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'ma cracked plate.

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.

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. 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.

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.

But 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. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it

Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about. She had already experienced them through Logan and Joe. She felt like slapping some of them for sitting around grinning at her like a pack of cheesy cats, trying to make out they looked like love.