Quotes By Zora Neale Hurston

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

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

When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

It's a funny thing, the less people have to live for, the less nerve they have to risk losing nothing.

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Gods always love the people who make em.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

I regret all of my books.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

It costs you something to do good!

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.