Zora Neale Hurston
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.Collection: Morning
Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.Collection: Gardening
So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.Collection: Courage
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.Collection: Love
It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.Collection: Nature
There is something about poverty that smells like death.Collection: Death
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.Collection: Future
If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.Collection: Good
The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.Collection: Nature
It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.Collection: Dreams
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.Collection: Fear
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.Collection: Learning
Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!Collection: Work
It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.Collection: Funny
I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
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.
Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
I regret all of my books.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.
No man may make another free.
I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.
When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.
It costs you something to do good!
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Gods always love the people who make em.
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.
It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.Collection: Pain
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.Collection: Courage
There's two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing. And it's different on every shore. And living... well... There are years that ask questions and years that answer.Collection: Moving
Such as I am, I am a precious gift.Collection: Giving
If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.Collection: Personality
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. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. 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.Collection: Strong
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.Collection: Wisdom
Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.Collection: Beauty
All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.Collection: Kinfolk
I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.Collection: Country