Zora Neale Hurston (c.1891–1960) was an African-American novelist and folklorist. She was associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a 1920s intellectual, social, and artistic celebration of the African American culture of the rural South.
Born in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy and Washington, D.C.’s Howard University. She also studied cultural anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, worked under anthropologist Franz Boas, and became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston’s works include Mules and Men (1935,) a black folk interpretation of Biblical Jews. Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937,) which explores the themes of male oppression and female autonomy. Hurston also wrote plays, short stories, and the autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942.)
In the 1950s, Hurston withdrew from public life. Her controversial condemnation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on school desegregation distanced her from her contemporaries. She argued that the pressure for integration deprived the value of existing black institutions. Plagued by ill health in the final years, she died in poverty.
Novelist and social activist Alice Walker published the collection of Hurston’s writings I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (1979.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Zora Neale Hurston
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.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Tolerance
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Love
But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Welfare
Mystery is the essence of divinity.
—Zora Neale Hurston
If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Light, Humanity, Tolerance
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Doing Your Best, Potential, Possibilities
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Love
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Fear
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
—Zora Neale Hurston
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Topics: Friendship
You got to go there to know there.
—Zora Neale Hurston
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