- 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.
- It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
- The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
- No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
- Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
- Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
- There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
- Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
- Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
- No man may make another free.
- Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.
- Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
- Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
- There is something about poverty that smells like death.
- It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. . . . We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.
- Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.
- 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 weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston Quotes
By Jessica McElrath, About.com
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten collection.Suggested Reading
Zora Neale Hurston BiographySelected BibliographyHarlem Renaissance
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