Zora Neale Hurston

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in "the crowded street of life." That in itself need not be dangerous unless you have the open razors of personal vanity in your pants pocket. The passers-by don't hurt you, but if you go around like that, they make you hurt yourself.

Now, women forget all the 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.

No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate.

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

Please God, please suh, don't let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah'm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin', Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time.

Then you must tell them that love isn't something like a grindstone that's the same thing everywhere and do the same thing to everything it touches. Love is like the sea. It is a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and its different with every shore." (written properly and not in slang)

It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Janie knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and grovelling submission to those you can't. Once having set up her idols and built altars to the, it was imevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she would accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who recieve homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped Though indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.

He has only heard what I felt.