Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.
Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.
Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.
Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn’t represent a thing she wanted to know about.
And twelve more white men had stopped whatever they were doing to listen and pass on what happened between Janie and Tea Cake Woods, and as to whether things were done right or not. That was funny too...
The Estate of Zora Neale Hurston would like to thank those people who have worked so hard over the years in introducing new generations of readers to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. We are indebted to...
Somebody got to think for women and chillun and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves… When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.
Mrs. Turner was a milky sort of a woman that belonged to child-bed. Her shoulders rounded a little, and she must have been conscious of her pelvis because she kept it stuck out in front of her so she...
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.
Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion beca...
I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was part before the sun rol...
Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
They read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousne...
On. Then Tea Cake would help get supper afterwards. You don’t think Ah’m tryin’ tuh git outa takin’ keer uh yuh, do yuh, Janie, ’cause Ah ast yuh tuh work long side uh me? Tea Cake asked her at the en...
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 enlargeme...
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. S...
Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing, she was told over and again.
There was already something dead about him. He didn’t rear back in his knees any longer. He squatted over his ankles when he walked. That stillness at the back of his neck. His prosperous-looking bell...