Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is so desolate as a place where life has been and gone.
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.
Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars.
The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.
She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.
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.