Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

The fall from your dream into reality is especially hard when you've seen that you can fly.

I mean, I had probably an illusion of being the wife that, you know, I wanted to create a home. I wanted to have children. I wanted him to be a husband. It was never going to be that way. It couldn't be that way.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

…what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.

Love can be a huge mountain, a gentle garden, a raging storm, a cool breeze, or a perfect bath. But there is always fire somewhere nearby. There is always the red-hot stuff of the soul's initiation. If there isn't fire, then it isn't love ... If it doesn't insist that you move to your next level, if it doesn't take your heart and make it explode in a million pieces, only to fall back together again in some Moment of enlightened understanding, then you haven't really loved.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

If I knew that, I'd fall in love over and over again. Hearts aren't supposed to be mended. If you fall in love and it doesn't work out, you get a broken heart. What comes out of that will make you a better lover and partner next time.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

I think every time you get your heart broken, there's a little piece of it that chips away, and I don't think you ever get that piece back. But I think you're able to bandage it with time and with new people and other things that make you happy.

Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.

There are many people who consider love a dream, but they usually grow to think of marriage as the cold breakfast.

He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

I change the world by changing myself. I am changing the world by loving myself, by enjoying life, by making my personal world a dream of heaven. I change myself, and just like magic, other people start to change.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them.

Of all the uses of adversity which are sweet, none are sweeter than those which grow out of disappointed love.

My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest.