Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didnt know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, Ah hope you fall on soft ground, because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janies first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

Then you must tell them that love isnt something like a grindstone thats the same thing everywhere and do the same thing to everything it touches. Love is like the sea. It is a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and its different with every shore. (written properly and not in slang)

Please God, please suh, dont let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ahm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin, Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

And I cant die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, Im a cracked plate.

No, I do not weep at the world. Im too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Now, women forget all the things they dont want to remember, and remember everything they dont want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in the crowded street of life. That in itself need not be dangerous unless you have the open razors of personal vanity in your pants pocket. The passers-by dont hurt you, but if you go around like that, they make you hurt yourself.

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

...you got tuh go there tuh know there.

They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, Ah hope you fall on soft ground, because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janies first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.Good music they have here, he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done heard bout you just what they hope done happened.

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