619 Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

What yo' all reckon is the matter sho' 'nough?""Must be something terrible when white folks get slow about putting us to work.

Jim Allen laughed just as loud as anybody else and then he said: "We better hurry on to work befo' de buckra [white people] get in behind us." "Don't never worry about work," says Jim Presley. "There's more work in de world than there is anything else. God made de world and de white folks made work.

Dat's de reason de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De white man tells de n****r to work and he takes and tells his wife.

Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

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