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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.

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
Fact
Indian
United
Offer
Facts
Offers
Colored
Mother
Except
Negro
States
Whose
Grandfather
Nothing
Circumstances
Chief
Way
Side
Chiefs
Sides
Native

More quotes by Zora Neale Hurston

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An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Affection makes your spirit slither out from its concealing spot.
Zora Neale Hurston
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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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston
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A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.
Zora Neale Hurston
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The Haitian people are gentle and lovable except for their enormous and unconscious cruelty.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.
Zora Neale Hurston
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When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism.
Zora Neale Hurston
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If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.
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.
Zora Neale Hurston
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If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
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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If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.
Zora Neale Hurston
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That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!
Zora Neale Hurston
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Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again.
Zora Neale Hurston
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I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
Zora Neale Hurston
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I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am and the ebb but reveals me again. How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston
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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.
Zora Neale Hurston