There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside yo.—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On the Road(NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)
The varicolored cloud dust that the sun has stirred up in the sky was settling by slow degrees.
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…...
Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.
Tain't no use in you cryin' . . . But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die.
Stepto was quite convinced (and convincing) that the frame story in which Janie speaks to Pheoby creates only the illusion that Janie has found her voice, that Hurston's insistence on telling Janie's...
She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.
She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.
Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death
People can be slave ships in shoes.
Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulle...
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.
Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea.
Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go. Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful fo...
It’s uh known fact...you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh.
Death had found them watching, trying to see beyond seeing.
But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. —Zora Neale Hurston,...
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happened.
Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.