Zora Neale Hurston Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”

“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.”

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”

“She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.”

“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 something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.”

“She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.”

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.”

“So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.”

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”

“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.

From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.”

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

“There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”

“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

“Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.”

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed.

So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.”