Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

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.

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

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.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

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.

Such as I am, I am a precious gift.

If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.

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.

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.

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.

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.

You got to go there to know there.

Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

People can be slave-ships in shoes.