Zora Neale Hurston

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

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

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

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.

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

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

Gods always love the people who make em.

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

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

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

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

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

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

I regret all of my books.

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

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

It costs you something to do good!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.