This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.

— Zora Neale Hurston

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Her voice began snagging on the prongs of her feelings.

— Zora Neale Hurston

A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.

— Zora Neale Hurston

The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.

— Zora Neale Hurston

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.

— Zora Neale Hurston

He’s a whirlwind among breezes.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go.

— Zora Neale Hurston

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

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.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Most people is thin-brained.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Nothing is so desolate as a place where life has been and gone.

— Zora Neale Hurston

No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars.

— Zora Neale Hurston

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.

— Zora Neale Hurston

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.

— Zora Neale Hurston

The Fon of Dahomey was foremost among those African peoples who resisted the suppression. Not only was the internal enslavement of their prisoners perceived as essential to their traditions and customs, the external sell of their prisoners afforded.

— Zora Neale Hurston
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