Zora Neale Hurston
I do not pray. . . . I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men. . . . Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility.Collection: Prayer
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.Collection: Black
But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.Collection: Hate
Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? . . . The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. . . . If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.Collection: Men
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.Collection: Eye
I love myself when I am laughing.Collection: Love
I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.Collection: Feelings
It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.Collection: Hope
[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience.Collection: Long
All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.Collection: Fear
Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.Collection: Inspiring
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.Collection: Made
Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.Collection: Night
Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.Collection: Light
it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!Collection: Laughter
Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.Collection: I Can
I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal.Collection: Thinking
I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.Collection: Mean
That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.Collection: Names
If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.Collection: Wise
Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.Collection: Hurt
We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.Collection: Justice
Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.Collection: Life
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.Collection: Life
truth is a letter from courage!Collection: Letters
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.Collection: Soul
I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms.Collection: Change
Silence is all the genius a fool has.Collection: Silence
Mystery is the essence of divinityCollection: Essence
I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.Collection: Mind
There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.Collection: Inspirational
Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.Collection: Opportunity
I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!Collection: Girl
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slaver y is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.Collection: Depression
She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.Collection: Voice
She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.Collection: Found
It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.Collection: United States
I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.Collection: Mind
Magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Love Is
God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble.Collection: Beauty
Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.Collection: Wise
Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.Collection: Night
It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.Collection: Misunderstanding
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.Collection: Teacher
Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.Collection: Mouths
Every tub sits on its bottom.Collection: Tubs
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.Collection: Mean
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.Collection: Dream