Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, is a novel by Zora Neale Hurston written in English. The same year, Hurston also published Tell My Horse, making 1937 a period of notable output across her writing life.
Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. She attended Howard University before continuing her education at Barnard College and Columbia University. During her career she became associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement, and her work as a novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, playwright, and documentary filmmaker extended across several disciplines.
In addition to her novels, Hurston wrote more than fifty short stories and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. That breadth of creative and scholarly work was recognized when she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award supporting independent research and creative endeavor. She was a citizen of the United States throughout her life.
Hurston died on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was later inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame, an honor connecting her formally to the state of her birth.
Quotes by Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston's insights on:
Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, becuse every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice box seasons his own food.
I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was twisting me.
That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.
There two things everybody had to do: Go to God and find out what living is for yourself.
Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession.
Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.