My 13 Favorite Zora Neale Hurston Quotes
The following 13 quotes by Zora Neale Hurston resonated with me at some point over the last seven years that I wrote them in my commonplace book. Here they are in chronological order:
“Love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” -Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” -Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
“I had been lonely; I had been bare and bony of comfort and love… Now, I was to take up my pilgrim’s stick and go outside again. Maybe it would be different now…I took a firm grip on the only weapon I had- hope, and set my feet. Maybe everything would be all right from now on. Maybe. I put on my shoes and I started.” -Dust Tracks On a Road (1942)
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.” -Dust Tracks On a Road (1942)
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” -Dust Tracks On a Road (1942)
“Bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.” -Dust Tracks On a Road (1942)
“I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world.” -Dust Tracks On a Road (1942)
“These do be times that take all you have to scrape up a decent laugh or so. I do not refer to the battlefields, but to this enormous pest of hate that is rotting mens souls. When will people learn that you cannot quarantine hate? Once it gets loose in the world, it rides over all barriers and seeps under the doors and in the cracks of every house. I see it all around me every day. I am not talking of race hatred. Just hate. Everybody is at it. Kill, rend, and tear! Women who are supposed to be the softening influence in life screaming for the kill. Once it was just Germany, and Japan and Italy. Now, it is our allies as well. The people in the next county or state. The other political party. The world smells like an abbatoir. It makes me very unhappy. I am all wrong in this vengeful world. I will to love.” -Letter to Ben Botkin, October 16, 1944
“You come here for a reason, and not for a season.” -Polk County (1944)
“There is always room in oblivion. That is one place that is never full. Since Jim had left her, Arvay sometimes felt herself lost in the edges of the wastes. Her days had nothing in them now but hours. Hours that somebody else had gotten all the light and service out of and chunked them away. Old, worn-out, lifeless marks on time. Like raw, bony, homeless dogs, they took to hanging around her doorway. They were there when she got up in the morning, and still whimpering and whining of their emptiness when she went to bed at night.” -Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
“Regret is the most useless emotion in the world.” -Letter to Everett Hurston Jr., October 12, 1951
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” -Attributed to Zora Neale Hurston
“You are alive, aren’t you? Well, so long as you have no grave you are covered by the sky. No limit to your possibilities. The distance to heaven is the same everywhere.” -From Zora’s Sketchbook (undated)
