Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human flesh on the...
Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.
A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it.
There's two things everybody got to find out for theyselves; they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living.
Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
She must talk to a man who was ten immensities away.
Once upon uh time, Ah never ’spected nothin’, Tea Cake, but bein’ dead from the standin’ still and tryin’ tuh laugh. But you come ’long and made somethin’ outa me. So Ah’m thankful fuh anything we com...
Naw, Ah ain’t no young gal no mo’ but den Ah ain’t no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah’m uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s uh whole lot more’n you kin say. You...
Look lak she been livin' through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring.
For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas’s student at Barnard became metaphors,
Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied with mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this.
It seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!
Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all.
Then she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see,
The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.
So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time.
She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
Responding to Wright’s critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and not a treatise on sociology. It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Sol...
It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a ’gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep see...
In the cool afternoon the fiend from hell specifically sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear. Doubt.