619 Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.

Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Through this publication, Barracoon extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor, Barracoon speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.

I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, “What is there is no me like my statue?” The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.

But as de old folk always say, Ah’m born but Ah ain’t dead. No tellin’ whut Ah’m liable tuh do yet.

Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.