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All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through 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.

Zora Neale Hurston

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Zora Neale Hurston
Age: 69 †
Born: 1891
Born: January 7
Died: 1960
Died: January 28
Anthropologist
Civil Rights Advocate
Film Director
Folklorist
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Zora N. Hurston
Half
Wine
Altars
Fear
Flower
Cruel
Reason
Beginning
Require
Without
Divine
Flowers
Real
Emotion
Receive
Indiscriminate
Would
Blood
Gods
Dispense
Men
Wisdom
Otherwise
Worshipped
Suffering
Stones
Homage

More quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

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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.
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Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!
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It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.
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Africa has her mouth on Moses.
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When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.
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it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!
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He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
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Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
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...she woke up in time to see the sun sending up spies ahead of him to mark out the road through the dark. He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red.
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A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
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I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.
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I am the kind of a woman that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added attraction.
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Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.
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It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.
Zora Neale Hurston
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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.
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It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
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My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.
Zora Neale Hurston
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I been through living for years. I just ain't dead yet.
Zora Neale Hurston