Wrapped in Rainbows Quotes

“She also managed to win a citywide spelling bee, beating out students at all the other Negro schools in Jacksonville. “I received an atlas of the world and a Bible as prizes,” she recalled, “besides so much lemonade and cake that I told President Collier that I could feel it coming through my skin. He had such a big laugh that I made up my mind to hurry up and get grown and marry him.” Decades”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“True, I played, fought and studied with other children, but always I stood apart within. … A cosmic loneliness was my shadow.”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“Harlem’s rents were twelve to thirty dollars a month higher than in other areas of the city, although black New Yorkers earned lower salaries than their white counterparts. In the mid-1920s, thirty dollars was a significant chunk of money, equal to about $300 today. Still, a 1924 Urban League study found that Negroes paid from 40 percent to 60 percent higher rents than white people for the same class of apartments—and segregated housing practices did not give black folks the option to just move out of Harlem and into more affordable New York neighborhoods.”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“Zora did not mince words in this chapter and nothing seemed to escape her critical eye. Speaking of Christian hypocrisy, for example, she wrote: “Popes and Prelates, Bishops and Elders have halted sermons on peace at the sound of battle and rushed out of their pulpits brandishing swords and screaming for blood in Jesus’ name. The pews followed the pulpit in glee. So it is obvious that the Prince of Peace is nothing more than a symbol.”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“I shall never forget how the red ball of the sun hung on the horizon and raced along with the train for a short space,” she later wrote, “and then plunged below the belly-band of the earth. There have been other suns that set in significance for me, but that sun! It was a book-mark in the pages of a life.” While”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“Zora and her playmate Carrie Roberts also “spent long afternoons reading what Moses told the Hebrews not to do in Leviticus,” Zora remembered. “In that way I found out a number of things the old folks would not have told me. Not knowing what we were actually reading, we got a lot of praise from our elders for our devotion to the Bible.”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

“The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.”
― Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston