Ah jus’ know dat God snatched me out de fire through you. And Ah loves yuh and feel glad.
Joe was not there waiting for her, the change.
Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide.
You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ’em of they will.
I god, Ah can’t see what uh woman uh yo’ stability would want tuh be treasurin’ all dat gum-grease from folks dat don’t even own de house dey sleep in. ‘Tain’t no earthly use. They’s jus’ some puny humans playin’ round de toes uh Time.
Ah can look through muddy water and see dry land.
Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.
That was the rock she was battered against.
While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of Jonah’s Gourd Vine came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of attempting a book seemed so big that I gazed at it in the quiet of the night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight.
A little seed of fear was growing into a tree.
She was a wind on the ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port.
A little war of defense for helpless things was going on inside her. People ought to have some regard for helpless things. She wanted to fight about it.
Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a perfect example of this.
Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible.
Cudjo meetee de people at de gate and tells dem, “You see de rattlesnake in de woods?” Dey say, “Yeah.” I say “If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you, why you bother wid him? Same way wid my boys, you unnerstand me. If you leave my boys alone, dey not bother nobody!
We sat up in the trees and disputed about what the end of the world would be like when we got there – whether it was sort of tucked under like the hem of a dress, or just was a sharp drop off into nothingness.
If it wuzn’t for so many black folks it wouldn’t be no race problem. De white folks would take us in wid dem. De black ones is holdin’ us back.
Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.
Here it is just like it is in Egypt – the scared people do all of the biggest talk.
Ah’m uh man even if Ah is de Mayor. But de mayor’s wife is somethin’ different again.