There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
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…...
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...
Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.
So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world s...
She went on in her overalls. She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.
She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.
Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people!...
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.
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
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...
Just g’wan back home and set down on yo’ royal diasticutis and say nothin’.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature so...
But I ain't puttin' it in de street. Ah'm tellin' you.''Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don't pee-pee.
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happened.
Alice Walker published her important essay (In Search of Zora Neale Hurston) in Ms. magazine in 1975,
She woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.