Quotes By Zora Neale Hurston

It costs you something to do good!

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.

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

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

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

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

No man may make another free.

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.

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.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

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

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

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

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

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

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.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

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.

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

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

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.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

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

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

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

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

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

The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.