110+ Zora Neale Hurston Quotes On Writing, Education And Freedom

Zora Neale Hurston was an American dramatist and novelist from the early 20th century. She is best known for her novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and her contribution to the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was an influential figure in the African-American literary community and a major contributor to the cultural expression of the African-American experience. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Zora Neale Hurston on writing, education, love.

Top 10 Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

1. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.
2. Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
3. If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
4. Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
5. There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
6. I love myself when I am laughing. . . and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.
7. Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.
8. If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.
9. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
10. Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Zora Neale Hurston Image Quotes

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. — Zora Neale Hurston

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston

Gods always behave like the people who make them. — Zora Neale Hurston

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. — Zora Neale Hurston

Such as I am, I am a precious gift. — Zora Neale Hurston

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. — Zora Neale Hurston

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it. — Zora Neale Hurston

I love myself when I am laughing. — Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Short Quotes

• Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
• Such as I am, I am a precious gift.
• Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
• A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
• Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
• Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.
• No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
• I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
• It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.
• Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About Love

I love myself when I am laughing. — Zora Neale Hurston

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump. — Zora Neale Hurston

Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place. — Zora Neale Hurston

He looked like the love thoughts of women. — Zora Neale Hurston

Now they got to look into me loving Tea Cake and see whether it was done right or not! They don't know if life is a mess of corn-meal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt! — Zora Neale Hurston

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear. — Zora Neale Hurston

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life! — Zora Neale Hurston

Perhaps love is a compelling necessity imposed on man by God that has something to do with suffering — Zora Neale Hurston

I have a strong suspicion . that much that passes for constant love is a golded- up moment walking in its sleep. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About Life

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships. — Zora Neale Hurston

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. — Zora Neale Hurston

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death. — Zora Neale Hurston

When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to. — Zora Neale Hurston

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. — Zora Neale Hurston

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches — Zora Neale Hurston

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death. — Zora Neale Hurston

Most things are born in the mothering darkness and most things die. Darkness is the womb of creation, my boy. But the sun with his seven horns of flame is the father of life. — Zora Neale Hurston

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her. — Zora Neale Hurston

I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living. — Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About People

It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion. — Zora Neale Hurston

People can be slave-ships in shoes. — Zora Neale Hurston

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes. — Zora Neale Hurston

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow. — Zora Neale Hurston

I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor. — Zora Neale Hurston

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. — Zora Neale Hurston

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams. — Zora Neale Hurston

The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty. — Zora Neale Hurston

If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige? — Zora Neale Hurston

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

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About Gods

I do not pray. . . . I do not expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men. . . . Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God. — Zora Neale Hurston

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves. — Zora Neale Hurston

God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble. — Zora Neale Hurston

Gods always love the people who make em. — Zora Neale Hurston

Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

Please God, please suh, don't let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah'm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin', Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time. — Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About Live

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. — Zora Neale Hurston

Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil. — Zora Neale Hurston

Everybody is two beings: one lives and flourishes in the daylight and stands guard. The other being walks and howls at night. — Zora Neale Hurston

Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living. — Zora Neale Hurston

There's two things everybody got to find out for themselves: they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living. Now, love is like the sea. It's a moving thing. And it's different on every shore. And living... well... There are years that ask questions and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston

I been through living for years. I just ain't dead yet. — Zora Neale Hurston

The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. — Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes About Made

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them. — Zora Neale Hurston

The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet… From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. — Zora Neale Hurston

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me. — Zora Neale Hurston

[Proverbs] are short sayings made out of long experience. — Zora Neale Hurston

...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red. — Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Famous Quotes And Sayings

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. — Zora Neale Hurston

There are years that ask questions and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston

Gods always behave like the people who make them. — Zora Neale Hurston

Such as I am, I am a precious gift. — Zora Neale Hurston

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. — Zora Neale Hurston

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. — Zora Neale Hurston

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. — Zora Neale Hurston

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. — Zora Neale Hurston

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it. — Zora Neale Hurston

I love myself when I am laughing. — Zora Neale Hurston

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day. — Zora Neale Hurston

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. — Zora Neale Hurston

It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States. — Zora Neale Hurston

Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday. — Zora Neale Hurston

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning. — Zora Neale Hurston

It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. — Zora Neale Hurston

She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. — Zora Neale Hurston

I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. — Zora Neale Hurston

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil. — Zora Neale Hurston

I wish I could buy you for what you are really worth and sell you for what you think you're worth. I sure would make money on the deal. — Zora Neale Hurston

every heart has its graveyard. — Zora Neale Hurston

If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony. — Zora Neale Hurston

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. — Zora Neale Hurston

No man may make another free. — Zora Neale Hurston

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! — Zora Neale Hurston

So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter. — Zora Neale Hurston

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. — Zora Neale Hurston

I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks. — Zora Neale Hurston

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence. — Zora Neale Hurston

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

I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe. — Zora Neale Hurston

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. — Zora Neale Hurston

It must be recess in (heaven) if St. Peter is lettin his angels out. — Zora Neale Hurston

For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks. — Zora Neale Hurston

They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down. — Zora Neale Hurston

Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear, and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. — Zora Neale Hurston

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass. — Zora Neale Hurston

Every tub sits on its bottom. — Zora Neale Hurston

It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that. — Zora Neale Hurston

The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky. — Zora Neale Hurston

Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress. — Zora Neale Hurston

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation. — Zora Neale Hurston

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say. — Zora Neale Hurston

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. — Zora Neale Hurston

To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat. — Zora Neale Hurston

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful. — Zora Neale Hurston

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue. — Zora Neale Hurston

Mystery is the essence of divinity — Zora Neale Hurston

truth is a letter from courage! — Zora Neale Hurston

I note that the Africa loves to depict the grace of reptiles. — Zora Neale Hurston

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe. — Zora Neale Hurston

anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something! — Zora Neale Hurston

When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism. — Zora Neale Hurston

Life Lessons by Zora Neale Hurston

1. Zora Neale Hurston taught us to embrace our unique identity and to not be afraid to be ourselves. She also encouraged us to use our creativity to express ourselves and to never let anyone limit our potential.
2. Hurston also believed in the power of resilience and perseverance, and she showed us that with hard work and dedication, anything is possible.
3. Lastly, Hurston taught us the importance of having a strong sense of self-worth and to never give up on our dreams, no matter how hard life may seem.