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c0f758a
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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 ..
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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6029dd2
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She wasn't petal-open anymore with him. She was twenty-four and seven years married when she knew. She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen. It happened over one of those dinners that chasten all women sometimes. They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a scorchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans. Janie was a good cook, and Joe had looked forward to his dinner as ..
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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2631d45
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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. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first water diamond, an empty ..
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sanguine
pride
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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207fbc5
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It looked so quiet and peaceful around. But the stillness was the sleep of swords.
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quiet
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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07a1184
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All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the "black ivory," the "coin of Africa," had no market value. Africa's ambassadors to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no recorded thought."
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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66d77de
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Responding to Wright's critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and "not a treatise on sociology." It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker's depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of "racial health--a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature." In a trad..
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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02dadfc
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It is so easy to be hopeful in the day time when you can see the things you wish on.
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their-eyes-were-watching-god
zora-neale-hurston
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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3db434c
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Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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d56fba5
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Where is de house where de mouse is de leader?
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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a13727d
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It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.
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literature
feminism
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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6a0f5f1
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She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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ab6a316
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Let the sun go down on you like King Harold at the battle of Hastings -- fighting gloriously. Maybe a loser but what a loser! Greater in defeat than the conqueror. Certainly not a coward that rusted out lurking in his tent.
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defeat
winners-mentality
winning-and-losing
zora-neale-hurston
losing
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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746e35c
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It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the 'gator and the 'gator in your sister, and you'd rather not.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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d7a9ab5
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There's two things everybody got to find out for theyselves; they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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1598bbf
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People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.
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opportunity
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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426d809
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You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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350a390
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Just g'wan back home and set down on yo' royal diasticutis and say nothin'.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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3d621fb
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She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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706e202
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Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing," she was told over and again."
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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56dcf77
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The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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c8eb11f
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Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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97bc447
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She knew because she looked.
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their-eyes-were-watching-god
zora-neale-hurston
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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a8fc2f7
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Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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e0c46eb
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Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story.
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storytelling
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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b07c9a9
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Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death
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religion
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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c4a5779
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I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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65ab486
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you needs uh man." Janie laughed at all these well-wishers because she knew that they knew plenty of women alone; that she was not the first one they had ever seen. But most of the others were poor. 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. She had already experienced them..."
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single-woman
single
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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5157329
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Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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2a5583e
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He has only heard what I felt.
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music
race
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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1be644a
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Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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61bb2c6
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Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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4b4a00b
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Naw, Ah ain't no young gal no mo' but den Ah ain't no old woman neither. Ah reckon Ah looks mah age too. But Ah'm uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat's uh whole lot more'n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice. Humph! Talkin' 'bout me lookin' old! When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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85e41b2
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Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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8451d13
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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 circumloc..
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inspirational-attitude
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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84580cc
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Janie full of that oldest human longing - self-revelation.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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70e0845
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They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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1a4df5b
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Death had found them watching, trying to see beyond seeing.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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75846f4
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They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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99e47b2
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You got de keys to de kingdom.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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9f0e6d8
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Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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565c9ff
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A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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07a3bf2
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So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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ddf4242
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There was some more good-natured laughter at the expense of women.
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Zora Neale Hurston |
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8392ce8
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they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction.
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Zora Neale Hurston |