Zora Neale Hurston

"The inside of a place can never be judged by the outside."

"Is it a sin to glory in the truth?"

"It was not a meek acceptance, but rather a deep understanding."

"The capacity to dream is what separates humans from beasts."

"Sweat, blood, and tears—that is the price of creation."

"I did not just want to exist in this world; I wanted to live in it."

"You must learn to live with contradiction."

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does."

"Misery and monotony—that is what slavery has created."

"I am choosing to see the good in people, even when they don't see it in themselves."

"Knowledge without application is just theory."

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

"Every woman is a reflection of her mother."

"The gods have come down, and they are walking among us."

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you."

"Your speaking silence means volumes."

"But, are you listening?"

"The mind of woman is cleaner than the mind of man."

"This is how you know you are in love: you can't sleep and you can't eat."

"Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean."

"I could see that she was already beginning to strain against her fate."

"The day you stop learning is the day you stop living."

"Folk tales are the boiled-down juice of human experience."

"I find hope in the darkest of days and focus in the brightest."

"You got to be a woman twenty-four hours a day to know what that's like."

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

"But I learned a long time ago that you cannot make people be ready for a thing."

"I have earned my right to fail."

"Tell my story."

"The present was an egg laid by the past."