Zora Neale Hurston

If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Dat's what makes life so funny. Everybody want to be boss and nobody don't want to be boss.

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

Black women are the mules of the world.

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. That is the life of men. 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.

Gator got your tongue? Or did a chicken peck it out?

She was a rut in the road. Everybody else rode on, but she was stuck.

It seems to me that the human race is like a lot of children playing in a nursery, and the grown-ups are not coming.

All my life, I have been a black woman. I have never been anything else.

I like myself when I am laughing. And then I think that is the best way to like yourself. To be laughing.

It is not the world that is poisoned, but the vision of the people in it.

White people are not the problem. It is the problem of white people that they think they are the problem.

Negroes are not a race. They are a political designation.

No man can make me feel inferior without my consent.

The very first principle of life is this: Never let anybody get your goat.

I want to be a poet, a painter, a writer, a dancer, a singer. I want to be a human being.

It is a common thing for a man to be in love with his wife when she is dead.

You can't be a woman and not know how to love.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not feel cheated by God in any way.