Zora Neale Hurston
They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Men
You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.Collection: Ideas
You got to go there to know there.Collection: Knows
every heart has its graveyard.Collection: Heart
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.Collection: Heart
Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know.Collection: Show Me
Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.Collection: Life
A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.Collection: People
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.Collection: Song
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branchesCollection: Tree
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.Collection: White
Affection makes your spirit slither out from its concealing spot.Collection: Spirit
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.Collection: Towns
I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.Collection: Life
If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.Collection: Giving
The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles a hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.Collection: Wind
When Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field of the sky -- to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.Collection: Doors
It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Memories
The inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West. God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one. Dark people are always "bad" when they do not admit the Divine Plan like that. A certain Javanese man who sticks up for Indonesian Independence is very lowdown by the papers, and suspected of being a Japanese puppet.Collection: Dark
To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.Collection: Jamaica
I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for herself.Collection: Water
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.Collection: Mother
It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.Collection: Differences
To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.Collection: Kindness
I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.Collection: Regret
I was born in a Negro town.Collection: Race
I am the kind of a woman that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added attraction.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Father
She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.Collection: Dream
Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.Collection: Fit
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.Collection: Ambition
Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.Collection: Remembers Everything
She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.Collection: Men
If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.Collection: Light
My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.Collection: Doubt
When we sing the blues, we're singin' out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.Collection: Hurt
Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.Collection: Crush
Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in 'im.Collection: Men
...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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Two
She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.Collection: Eye
Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.Collection: Spring
Gods always love the people who make 'em.Collection: People
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.Collection: Life
It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.Collection: Responsibility
anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!Collection: Lying
It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.Collection: Gratitude