Their Eyes Were Watching God Chicken Drink Water but He Don't Pee-pee

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"It's uh known fact...you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah'm lyin'. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored."
― Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

"So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"But I ain't puttin' it in de street. Ah'm tellin' you.'
'Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don't pee-pee."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!"
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

"Maybe if she had known some other way to try, she might have made his face different. But what the other way could be, she had no idea."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"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

"Being under my own roof, and my personality not invaded by others makes a lot of difference in my outlook on life and everything. Oh, to be once more alone in a house!"
― Zora Neale Hurston

"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."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing a achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negros did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That wad Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

"I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth the glory of change. I was, when the earth hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated in infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble in space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, every moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with infinite and need no other assurance."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

"Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of the heart."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Mrs. Turner was a milky sort of a woman that belonged to child-bed. Her shoulders rounded a little, and she must have been conscious of her pelvis because she kept it stuck out in front of her so she could always see it. Tea Cake made a lot of fun about Mrs. Turners shape behind her back. He claimed that she had been shaped up by a cow kicking her from behind. She was an ironing board with things throwed at it. Then that same cow took and stepped in her mouth when she was a baby and left it wide and flat with her chin and nose almost meeting."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied with mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him after this."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over."
― Zora Neale Hurston

"Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears."
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Dust Tracks on a Road
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Their Eyes Were Watching God Chicken Drink Water but He Don't Pee-pee

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15151.Zora_Neale_Hurston?page=7

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