619 Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

Man, like all the other animals, fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign. --Essay "What White Publishers Won't Print" (Negro Digest, April 1950)

Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings — fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.

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

You see de rattlesnake in de woods?' Dey say, 'Yeah.' I say 'If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him?' (Oluale Kossula)

She must talk to a man who was ten immensities away.

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

All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die," Sister Berry snapped.