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Dust Tracks on a Road QUOTES

Dust Tracks on a Road QUOTES

21 " Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human flesh on the block? That was only an outside symbol. Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others. All of the outward signs come out of that. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

22 " It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

23 " Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people! "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

24 " Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

25 " I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What is there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

26 " 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 perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble in space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, every moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with infinite and need no other assurance. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

27 " I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

28 " 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. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

29 " Once, when they used to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask me about the differences between the ordinary Negro and “the better-thinking Negro”, I used to show my irritation by saying I did not know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better thinkers was another matter. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

30 " While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of Jonah's Gourd Vine came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of attempting a book seemed so big that I gazed at it in the quiet of the night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

31 " There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside yo.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On the Road
(NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

32 " There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

(NOT Maya Angelou, NOT I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

33 " I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself “Why?” afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

34 " I found out too that you are bound to be jostled in "the crowded street of life." That in itself need not be dangerous unless you have the open razors of personal vanity in your pants pocket. The passers-by don't hurt you, but if you go around like that, they make you hurt yourself. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

35 " To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat. I have no urge to make any concessions like that to the world as yet. I might be like that some day, but I doubt it. I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands, and I don’t intend to run until you run me. So why give off the smell of something dead under the house while I am still in there tussling with my sword in my hand? "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

36 " Not every skunk in the world rates a first-class killing. Hanging is too good for some folks. They just need their behinds kicked. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

37 " not enough to make a flea a waltzing jacket. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

38 " There is no diffused light on anything international so that a comparatively whole scene may be observed. Light is sharply directed on one spot, leaving not only the greater part in darkness but also denying by implication that the great unlighted field exists. It is no longer profitable, with few exceptions, to ask people what they think, for you will be told what the wish, instead. Perhaps at no other period in the history of the world have people lived in such a dreamy state. People even waste time denouncing their enemies in open warfare for shooting back too hard, or too accurately. There is no attempt to be accurate as to truth, however. The whole idea is to be complimentary to one's self and keep alive the dream. The other man's side commits gross butcheries. One's own side wins smashing victories. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

39 " We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own. If the patient dies from the treatment, it was not because the medicine was not good. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road

40 " We sat up in the trees and disputed about what the end of the world would be like when we got there—whether it was sort of tucked under like the hem of a dress, or just was a sharp drop off into nothingness. "

― Zora Neale Hurston , Dust Tracks on a Road