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21 " It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different. "
― Zora Neale Hurston , Their Eyes Were Watching God
22 " Please God, please suh, don't let him love nobody else but me. Maybe Ah'm is uh fool, Lawd, lak dey say, but Lawd, Ah been so lonesome, and Ah been waitin', Jesus. Ah done waited uh long time. "
23 " No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. "
24 " It was the meanest moment of eternity. "
25 " And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate. "
26 " Now, women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. "
27 " ...you got tuh go there tuh know there. "
28 " 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. "
29 " An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' bout you just what they hope done happened. "
30 " They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged. "
31 " Pheoby's hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. "
32 " Husbands and wives always loved each other, and that was what marriage meant. It was just so. Janie felt glad of the thought, for then it wouldn't seem so destructive and mouldy. She wouldn't be lonely anymore. "
33 " Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain "
34 " Tain't no use in you cryin' . . . But folks is meant to cry 'bout somethin' or other. Better leave things de way dey is. Youse young yet. No tellin' whut mout happen befo' you die. "
35 " They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master... "
36 " Alice Walker published her important essay (“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”) in Ms. magazine in 1975, "
37 " The Estate of Zora Neale Hurston would like to thank those people who have worked so hard over the years in introducing new generations of readers to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. We are indebted to Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, and all the Modern Language Association folks who helped usher in Zora’s rediscovery. "
38 " Stepto was quite convinced (and convincing) that the frame story in which Janie speaks to Pheoby creates only the illusion that Janie has found her voice, that Hurston's insistence on telling Janie's story in the third person undercuts her power as speaker. While the rest of us in the room struggled to find our voices, Alice Walker rose and claimed hers, insisting passionately that women did not have to speak when men thought they should, that they would choose when and where they wish to speak because while many women had found their own voices, they also knew when it was better not to use it. "
39 " This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression. "
40 " Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore. "