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.
Zora Neale Hurston
So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.
Zora Neale Hurston
Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
Zora Neale Hurston
The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.
Zora Neale Hurston
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
Zora Neale Hurston
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston
There is something about poverty that smells like death.
Zora Neale Hurston
Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.
Zora Neale Hurston
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
Zora Neale Hurston
When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.
Zora Neale Hurston
Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.
Zora Neale Hurston
The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
Zora Neale Hurston
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
Zora Neale Hurston
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston
It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
It’s a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.
Zora Neale Hurston
It’s no use of talking unless people understand what you say.
Zora Neale Hurston
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
No man may make another free.
Zora Neale Hurston
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
Zora Neale Hurston
It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.
Zora Neale Hurston
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Zora Neale Hurston
I regret all of my books.
Zora Neale Hurston
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Zora Neale Hurston
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.
Zora Neale Hurston
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.
Zora Neale Hurston
It costs you something to do good!
Zora Neale Hurston
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
Zora Neale Hurston
Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Zora Neale Hurston
Gods always love the people who make em.
Zora Neale Hurston
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
Zora Neale Hurston
I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.
Zora Neale Hurston
I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston
I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.
Zora Neale Hurston
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Zora Neale Hurston