The American Dream is a major theme in the narrative of racial difference. The shadow side of that dream, which is not talked about, entails the plundering of racial “Others.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Janie had had no chance to know things, so she had to ask. Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day? In.
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. She had already experienced them through Logan and Joe. She felt like slapping some of them for sitting around grinning at her like a pack of cheesy cats, trying to make out they looked like love.
He had given Israel back the notes to songs. The words would be according to their own dreams, but they would sing. They had songs and singers. They might not be absolutely free inside, but anyway he had taken from them the sorrow of serving without will, and had given them the strife of freedom. He had called to their memories the forgotten words of love and family. They had the blessing of being responsible for their own.
Many a man thinks he is making something when he’s only changing things around.
But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image.
Thankee Jesus! Someone come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee someobody who I is, so maybe dey go in the Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.
He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.
Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.
Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.
Her voice began snagging on the prongs of her feelings.
A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.
The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.
Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the west. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. what need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come.
I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.
He’s a whirlwind among breezes.
Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go.
Whole nations are transported, exterminated, their name to be forgotten, except in the annual festival of their conquerors, when sycophants call the names of the vanquished countries to the remembrance of the victors.
We proaged on thru the woods that was full of magnolia, pine, cedar, oak, cypress, hickory, and many kinds of trees whose names I do not know. It is hard to know all the trees in Florida.
Most people is thin-brained.