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There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.

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
Around
Air
Dropping
Fetid
Soul
Dreams
Dry
Smothered
Heart
Poverty
Season
Sickly
Long
Dead
Impulse
Rotting
Something
Feet
Leaves
Impulses
Like
Lives
Seasons
Smells
People
Death
Smell
Underground
Dream
Shoes
Caves

More quotes by 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.
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There is something about poverty that smells like death.
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I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
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People can be slave-ships in shoes.
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To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.
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Such as I am, I am a precious gift.
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For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.
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Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
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You'se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.
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Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
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I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.
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I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
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She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
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Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.
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Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches
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The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody toassociate with me who does not wish me near them?
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To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.
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It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.
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It is easy to be hopeful in the day when you can see the things you wish on.
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I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.
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