Moses, Man of the Mountain Quotes

“Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful. And the very next law is that people talk about tenderness and mercy, but they love force. If you feed a thousand people you are a nice man with suspicious motives. If you kill a thousand you are a hero. Continue to get them killed by the thousands and you are a great conqueror, than which nothing on earth is greater. Oppress them and you are a great ruler. Rob them by law and they are proud and happy if you let them glimpse you occasionally surrounded by the riches that you have trampled out of their hides. You are truly divine if you meet their weakness with the sword to slay and the dogs to tear. The only time you run a great risk is when you serve them. The most repulsive thing to all men is gratitude. Men give up property, freedom and even life before they will have the obligation laid on them. Yet they make offerings at every altar and pray fervently to every god they have ever made to make them thankful. But no god has ever twisted Nature to that extent. So they often rush out of temples to destroy those who have served them too well.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, “was something internal…. The man himself must make his own emancipation.” And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.” Her strategy was not calculated to please.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“They were unexpected visitors, those stories were…and they stood outside his door until they were asked to come in. He did not know why they called upon him and did not call on many others. They tortured him at times, these people and events who came unasked and walked about in his mind. They always seemed to want to get out where people could see them. That had puzzled the old stableman a great deal because they were not always beautiful nor their behavior pleasant. Nevertheless one and all wanted to get out as soon as every they could to show themselves. They always departed about their own business once they had been given outside life….These, his images and happenings of the mind, scrambled from his lips and entertained the listeners for a day, then went to join the thousands of other dreams where they dwelt. Where did they hide? He did not know. But he believed that they did not die. They were stronger and more enduring than men.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“This freedom is a funny thing,' he told them. 'It ain't something permanent like rocks and hills. It's like manna; you just got to keep on gathering it fresh every day. If you don't, one day you're going to find you ain't got none no more.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“It’s bad to have some power, but not enough.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“She must lend her ears to the sounds of mighty words boiling out of futile men. She must bear something in male form, for after all that is what she was born for—a passageway for boy children.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“As author, she functions as “a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law.” The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health”—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.” In a tradition in which male authors have ardently denied black literary paternity, this is a major development, one that heralds the refinement of our notion of tradition: Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman’s voice.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“After Hurston and her choice of style for the black novel were silenced for nearly three decades, what we have witnessed since is clearly a marvelous instance of the return of the repressed. For Zora Neale Hurston has been “rediscovered” in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition: several black women writers, among whom are some of the most accomplished writers in America today, have openly turned to her works as sources of narrative strategies, to be repeated, imitated, and revised, in acts of textual bonding. Responding to Wright’s critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and “not a treatise on sociology.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“before. They were still a horde of slaves, then. To his dying day he would always feel bad about this first great failure of his. But, well, anyway, this time Israel had her songs and her singers. Israel had a fine army of fighters. Israel had laws on tables of stone and Israel had a God. He had lifted their eyes to the mountain. Out of a rotting mass of creeds he had made a religion that had height and depth. Of course, he had made his mistakes and had his regrets. But every heart has its graveyard. But some things had been well done. Now God had a voice and glory. So Israel was at the Jordan in every way. He”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“He had given Israel back the notes to songs. The words would be according to their own dreams, but they would sing. They had songs and singers. They might not be absolutely free inside, but anyway he had taken from them the sorrow of serving without will, and had given them the strife of freedom. He had called to their memories the forgotten words of love and family. They had the blessing of being responsible for their own.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don’t forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that’s the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“What would slaves want to be free for anyway? They are being fed and taken care of. What more could they want?”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“Here it is just like it is in Egypt—the scared people do all of the biggest talk.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we’re the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put ’em on. He aims to keep us down so he’ll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“We want to know how we can recognize his signs when we meet 'em. What animal does he live in? Is he a bull like Apis, a cow like Isis, a cat like—"
    "This god never shows himself through any animal. He has no representations on earth in any form. He speaks in fire and smoke, but the fire and smoke are not god. He has no images and wants none made in his name."
    "What is the name of this god, Moses? Maybe he is a god of Egypt who has left Egypt and sends to us from some place away off."
    "No, he is no Egyptian god. He has not uttered his name as yet."
    "You must not know a whole heap about this god your own self, Moses, if you don't even know his name. Didn't you even find out that much about him?”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don't know nothing about 'em. He makes 'em his own self and he's glad when we come tell him they hurt. Why, that's a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, he's got a law about everything under the sun! Next thing you know, he'll be saying cats can't have kittens. He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“He had found out that no man may make another free. Freedom was something internal. The outside signs were just signs and symbols of the man inside. All you could do was to give the opportunity for freedom and the man himself must make his own emancipation.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain