Quotes by "Zora Neale Hurston"

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death

Looka heah, Tea Cake, if you ever go off from me and have a good time lak dat and then come back heah tellin' me how nice Ah is, Ah specks tuh kill yuh dead. You heah me?

Common danger made common friends.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.

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

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.