"If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it."
"They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down."
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Source: Zora Neale Hurston (1937). “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, p.61, University of Illinois Press
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"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
"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."
"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
"All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk."