Zora Neale Hurston Quotes - Page 4

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.

I love myself when I am laughing.

It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.

Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

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.

Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self. Do, you'll be dying befo' yo' time is out.

The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet… From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.

want won't kill you half as quick as worry will.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning.

I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person.

I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

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.