From Zora Neale Hurston

I'd like to serve up a little celebration here of Hurston's words. Why? Because they are so damn good, I can't help myself. I'd scribbled out these pieces while I was reading Hurston last summer, and when I came across them again the other night, I felt an urge to run out and read more from this most unusual and most talented and, often, most contradictory of writers.

From Their Eyes Were Watching God:

"She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop."

From Dust Tracks on the Road, Hurston's fictionalized autobiography (dare I call it a memoir?):

"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 a fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes."

Another bit from TETWG:

"'Then you  must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhare and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak da sea. It's a uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from da shore it meets, and its different with every shore.'"

Comments

[Othemts]

Another great post. Zora Neale Hurston is another one of my all-time favorite authors.

[mansuetude]

I love Hurston, too--she talks in "Her Eyes were watching GOd" about how we women get stuck on a hook (of love) and that hook kind of hangs us up for the rest of our lives... !

That first quote above reminds me of line in Toni Morrison's Sula, about how Sula was an "artist without an art," and so she got in trouble... I always loved this idea, its true of so many women.