Menna Praag > Menna's Quotes

“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

“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 belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“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.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Mystery is the essence of divinity”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings

“I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”
― Rachel Carson