Zora Neale Hurston Quotes - Page 3

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.

anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

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.

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.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

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.

Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.

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.

Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.

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.

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!

It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.

every heart has its graveyard.

Distance is the only cure for certain diseases.

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

you can't beat me and my prayers!

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.